I recently purchased the P180 case and the TP-II 480 power (without blue led). To give more information on my system, I have an ASUS K8N-E Deluxe motherboard, an Athlon 64 3400 processor, 1 GB of Crucial Ram in one slot (DIMM1). I also have an slightly dated ATI Radeon 9600 SE video card, a DVD-Rom drive, a floppy drive,and a western digital 120 GB Hard drive. the CPU cooler is a Thermaltake Silent Boost K8. This is my first time building a computer.

For the first boot I didn't have the hard drive, floppy, or dvd drive installed. I have worn an antistatic wrist wrap connected to the back unpainted metal surface of the case while working with the components. I powered it up for the first time, it all seemed to work, the BIOS recognized all the hardware. One very disconcerting event though, was that upon hitting the front power button, I heard a loud electrical type popping noise. As I said I'm fairly new at this, but that didn't sound good. However everything seemed to be working. By the way, I had at the time inserted the 3 pin power fan control connector to the Chassis-Fan connector on the motherboard, as I couldn't make it reach the Power-Fan connector. I didn't notice this at first, but the power supplie's fan is not moving at all. Furthermore, I cannot get the case fans to work. They are the 3 Tricool fans that come standard with the case, when I first tried them I had them attached to the Fan Only connecters (all these connections are 4 pin), and set on High as the psu manual recommends if using the fan only connectors. They were attached when the popping sound occured. Now, if I have them attached to the fan only connectors, they do not work, but the system boots up. I tried connecting them to the normal power connections, but if any fan is connected to any of those connections, when I press the front power button, the CPU fan will spin for about a second and then stop, the system does not boot, and any further presses of the power button produce no effect whatsoever, until I have reconnected the power cord. I originally had the power cord connected to surge protector, which was also powering the monitor, a clock, and a small fridge at the time. I have also tried connecting it to a wall socket by itseslf, but I get the same results. I have also tried setting the case fans to a variety of settings. The motherboard seems to be receiving power fine, and when listing the voltages available, they all seem to be accurate, the VCORE voltage is about 1.55 generally, if that is pertinent information. Anyway,the PSU seems at least partially functional, the only problem is the fans.

So, I'm wondering if there is something I can do to fix this problem, or if somehow the power supply has been damaged, or what's going on in general. Thanks very much.

Well, I worked around with it a bit, I tried booting up the motherboard outside of the case, and as before that worked, but the fans still didn't. I put it back, on a whim gave it another try, and now I can get the especially powerful fan by the power supply to work, as well as one of the case fans. The power supply fan itself still does not seem to work however. For those who aren't familiar with it, in the P180 case the power supply sits at the bottom in a special chamber, which acts like a wind tunnel. The fan is just about 2 or 3 inches away, it is a 120mm fan with special depth to move more air. I'm still perplexed as to what is going on with the power supply fan and also the other case fan. So any ideas on that would be much appreciated. For now I'm thinking of running the computer with the fan next to the power supply on high (they recommend it on medium). Is this too risky? I'm not sure how sensitive the psu is to that, I feel pretty confident the fan can at least keep the outside of the psu cool. So thanks for any information on that, if anyone has any thoughts.