My five-year-old PC has recently started requiring five or six presses of the case power button before it turns on. Once it starts, everything works normally. There have also been several power blackouts recently, including abrupt shutdowns, so I'm wondering whether those could have damaged the PSU or motherboard. Could this just be a worn-out case switch, and what's the safest way to troubleshoot the problem? The system uses an MSI X570 Tomahawk motherboard, Ryzen 5 5600X, RTX 3080, Seasonic 750W Platinum PSU, 32GB Corsair memory, a Samsung 970 EVO 1TB SSD, and a Seagate 4TB hard drive in a be quiet! Pure Base 500DX case.
2 Answers
The blackouts could have stressed the PSU or motherboard, but the fact that the computer runs normally once powered on makes a faulty physical switch a strong possibility. Don’t open the PSU itself. If bypassing the case button doesn’t change anything, try a different power cable and a known-good outlet or surge protector, then test with a known-good PSU if possible. A PSU tester can check basic voltages, but it may not reveal every intermittent fault.
The power button is the easiest thing to rule out before blaming the PSU. Disconnect the PC’s front-panel power-switch connector from the motherboard, then briefly touch the two power-switch pins with a screwdriver. That momentary contact should do the same thing as pressing the case button. If the PC starts every time this way, the case switch or its wiring is probably failing. Be careful to touch only the correct two pins, and back up important data first.
That makes sense. I’ll back up anything important and check the front-panel connector before replacing expensive parts.
Modern PSUs usually don’t fail just because of a few outages, but unstable power can still cause damage. I’d test the button first and only suspect the PSU more strongly if the problem continues when the motherboard pins are shorted directly.