I've worked in and around datacenters for a few decades now and I've seen pretty much everything fail, but power supplies in particular do so at a higher rate than I expected. I've had one literally start smoking in my home office recently too. Luckily, it didn't damage any components, but it was pretty dramatic and abrupt -- just powered on my desktop and got nothing but a fog machine coming out of the rear fan until I yanked the power cord a few seconds later.

▲

davkan a day ago | parent | next [-]

My evga 1000w has been going strong for 11 years now. Cheaper power supplies fail often but if you buy quality and oversized they’ll outlast all your other components as they don’t become outdated.

▲

sva_ 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Had the EVGA 1000w fail on me. It did not fail dramatically though, rather it refused to output high power. Got a replacement under warranty

▲

milesvp a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s the caps that fail. Electrolytic caps have the highest failure rate of any passive component. My team tries to avoid them in our designs as much as possible. But you’re right, caps in a good design can easily last 20 years, making a power supply the longest lasting component of most builds.

	▲	davkan a day ago \| parent [-]
		My go to source for reviews was always jonnyguru.com but he closed up shop. Not sure who’s actually doing in-depth performance and component reviews these days.

▲

copperx 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What brand of power supply?