Burning smell on initial startup

[smith04]

I just built my first PC (well almost complete). I started it up and after some BIOS changes started loading Win XP MCE 2005. After a few minutes I started smelling burning from inside my PC. I turned it off, shut off power and opened it back up. No problems, it seems like the smell was from the power supply. I thought maybe dust in the power supply? I did smell like my house heating unit when turning it on for the first time of the season. Like dust burning.

I restarted, let it run with BIOS on to check temp of CPU and motherboard. After a few minutes I got that smell again but the temp of the CPU was about 36C and motherboard 30C.

I started load Win XP MCE 2005 again, and after a while the smell subsided some. I had the side of the PC off look for smoke, but none.

My case is an Antec Sonata II, my motherboard an Asus A8V-E SE, my CPU an AMD Athlon 64 3800+ X2. Fans are on the power supply, rear of the case, a CPU fan, and a fan on the ATI X600 Pro All-in-Wonder card.

Is this normal?


smith04

[saphalline]

Is this normal?Well... not really.

There's something wrong whenever a computer smells like burning dust, so I would strip out the mobo and start sniffing it for the smell. Then go through all your drives and the vid card. Then the PSU.

There's definitely something wrong here and it's better to know now when you can still return things rather than wait until some part dies.