It could just be that it's crapping out. I mean, that's the bad series of OCZ PSUs, and it's at least 3 years old. If you have another system that you could test the PSU on, then try that.
It just in the next room. It's a P4 single core 3.0GHz (32bit) rig, but that power supply should have all of the right connectors to power it up, let it go into suspend, utilize restart from the start menu, etc... to find out if it can actually power back up without the power supply switch being switched off and waiting a few seconds, then on again before the case's power button is used.
I'll post back with the results, but to get started early, say it doesn't do it on the reference PC, what are the next likely culprits? My thoughts are:
- Wiring between case switch and header on the motherboard shorting\faulty switch.
- Faulty hard drive. Fails to initialize previously opened session for some reason.
- Something subtle in Windows 7. Slight miscommunication between software and hardware. Doesn't seem to explain inability to power up from complete "off" state.
- I found something about this power supply in this hardware roundup\review (included in this summary is the 700W version of this PSU as they are nearly identical). The text of interest is this:
"Switching power supplies – any switching power supplies – cannot work under zero load because the energy accumulated in the inductances of the PSU’s output circuits (in the transformer or choke, depending on the topology employed) doesn’t go into the load, which results in an uncontrollable growth of voltage on the PSU output. The ATX standard, however, requires that the PSU be able to start up without external load, and the manufacturers used to install resistors that provided the necessary minimum of load. Such PSUs worked normally and yielded stable voltages even if nothing at all was connected to them.
Lately, those resistors have been abandoned as the manufacturers are trying to improve the efficiency of their products. Of course, the resistors dissipate little power, but this is still considerable when the PSU is under minimum load. Another problem rose up as a consequence. New PSUs would not start up with some mainboards, those that didn’t provide some minimum load right after the start. As a result, the PSU that didn’t have its own internal load would not operate correctly or would not send the Power OK signal to the mainboard.
To avoid this problem, FSP engineers implemented a “smart” internal load that works only for the first few seconds on your turning the PSU on. It is located on a separate small card (see the photograph above) and consists of two clusters of pull-up resistors, two transistors that connect those clusters to the +5V and +12V circuits, and an RC circuit that keeps the transistors open for a short interval after the turning on of the PSU. As soon as the RC circuit capacitor is charged up, the transistors close and turn off the pull-up resistors. By this time, the mainboard should have started up successfully, providing an external load on the PSU. This is how simple it is. It’s even strange that PSU manufacturers didn’t come to this solution long ago. The problem of not-starting-up mainboards wouldn’t have occurred then (this problem was reported not only with regards to FSP power supplies, by the way).
However, there can be another problem. The PSU may refuse to start up if you turn it on right after having shut it down. If the capacitor of the RC circuit hasn’t had enough time to get uncharged, the transistors will be open initially. I don’t think that’s much of problem, though. You can just wait for a few minutes and try to turn the PC on again."
...from this link:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cases/display/atx-psu6_5.html#
The only difference obvious to me is that my scenario requires the cycling of the power switch located on the power supply to boot the computer. It seems like an interesting lead but you would think they would have engineered this to an extent to avoid such unnecessary measures require for otherwise casual and reliable use. It doesn't show any other symptoms or shortcomings in performance under any conditions that I've noticed.
