[Dylanear]

I've considering buying a Fuel locally. The seller reports it's in great shape, but has one flaw. Occasionally it won't power on when the power button is pushed, but unplugging and plugging it back in will always then allow it to power on. 

Is this a known issue? Is it an indication of a problematic PSU as I see there's lot's of potential PSU issues with the Fuel. 

Quote from the seller. "I should say for the sake of honesty that it does have a little quirk which it has had since the day I bought it. Sometimes when you press the power on button it doesn't switch on but if you remove the power cable and plug it back in in then switches on no problem."

[Raion]

That's a PSU issue

[Dylanear]

I'd guess it would be. If it was just the switch or something unplugging and plugging wouldn't change much.

But is it a sign of impending doom, the PSU is about to die? Or just an independent issue that will just be an annoyance? Given that I'm not going to power this thing up and down daily, can I hope it's going to hold out just doing this, but no worse for years to come? Or should I expect a dead PSU in a matter of months or a year or so?

I guess the ATX PSU conversion may be worth doing to have one of the faster MIPS workstations they ever made?

If there are ATX converter boards, can you just take an ATX psu and the cabling, connectors from the original Fuel PSU and wire it up correctly?

[Raion]

Kuba sells an atx adapter. It's cheap enough to save you the trouble of doing it yourself as the fuel won't run a third party PSU in WTX spec if it doesn't report the correct env monitoring vars.

[Dylanear]

Kuba sells an atx adapter. It's cheap enough to save you the trouble of doing it yourself as the fuel won't run a third party PSU in WTX spec if it doesn't report the correct env monitoring vars.

Ah, so there's more to the adapter than just changing which wires go with which pins?

Do ATX PSUs just screw in? Or do you have to modify anything to get another PSU put in place?

[kubatyszko]

They screw in just fine, and they're lighter so there's no need for that hanger that the original PSU has on the inner top side of the case.
The only thing you should pay attention to is the location of the socket on the ATX PSU, it shouldn't be too close to the edge or else it will prevent you from attaching the PSU to the chassis.
Don't forget that you need about 30-35A on the 5V and 3v3 rails. DO NOT buy any fancy gaming PSU, those usually lack power in the 5v and 3v3 departments in favor of 12v for the CPU and GPU - which we don't care that much about here...
The most common range is about 500-650W.

The adapter represents several years of my on-and-off work, here are a couple features:

0) provides the right signals in the right places, including the "sense" signals to let the PSU regulate correctly
1) provides TWO auto-generated fan signals, one is fed via the 24 pin Molex plug into the motherboard (and enabled by default via jumper on the adapter board). The other (that single lonely pin on the board) is free for you to use, handy if you replace some other fan and need to feed the signal there.
2) it has 2 LED's - standby (yellow) and power-on (green), it will help you figure out whether the standby power is on, and then when the full ATX PSU is up and running.
3) it has a "kickstart" pushbutton, hold it, and it will FORCE the fuel to start (sounds like it could help you troubleshoot your power-on button issue). Most useful if the machine won't even start, but I would still allow you to observe the voltages and fan speeds via L1.

You need to keep the most important in mind - you're resuscitating a fuel that likely has broken power supply, there have been many cases that failing PSU took down other components. My adapter really helps in troubleshooting all of the above.

Cheers

[Dylanear]

They screw in just fine, and they're lighter so there's no need for that hanger that the original PSU has on the inner top side of the case.
The only thing you should pay attention to is the location of the socket on the ATX PSU, it shouldn't be too close to the edge or else it will prevent you from attaching the PSU to the chassis.
Don't forget that you need about 30-35A on the 5V and 3v3 rails. DO NOT buy any fancy gaming PSU, those usually lack power in the 5v and 3v3 departments in favor of 12v for the CPU and GPU - which we don't care that much about here...
The most common range is about 500-650W.

The adapter represents several years of my on-and-off work, here are a couple features:

0) provides the right signals in the right places, including the "sense" signals to let the PSU regulate correctly
1) provides TWO auto-generated fan signals, one is fed via the 24 pin Molex plug into the motherboard (and enabled by default via jumper on the adapter board). The other (that single lonely pin on the board) is free for you to use, handy if you replace some other fan and need to feed the signal there.
2) it has 2 LED's - standby (yellow) and power-on (green), it will help you figure out whether the standby power is on, and then when the full ATX PSU is up and running.
3) it has a "kickstart" pushbutton, hold it, and it will FORCE the fuel to start (sounds like it could help you troubleshoot your power-on button issue). Most useful if the machine won't even start, but I would still allow you to observe the voltages and fan speeds via L1.

You need to keep the most important in mind - you're resuscitating a fuel that likely has broken power supply, there have been many cases that failing PSU took down other components. My adapter really helps in troubleshooting all of the above.

Cheers

That sounds like a lot of impressive work! You sir are a gentleman and a scholar!   Love to hear of talented people like yourself helping keeping these machines going. If I get a Fuel, even if it's working (mostly working) I'll have to buy one of your adapters as it sounds like something any Fuel owner should have at this point.

[Trippynet]

Yep, I have one here. It is sitting in a drawer as I have an original Fuel PSU fitted at the moment, but it is a handy bit of security for when the original PSU decides to give up the ghost and I couldn't miss getting one for future use.