Can reversed polarity damage a motherboard?

[senile]

I plugged a PC into an incorrectly wired outlet socket, I did not notice at first because other electrical equipment worked fine.
There was no explosion or smoke but the motherboard appears to be dead, even though the PSU is running fine. If I'm not mistaken a PSU can work with reversed polarity and adjust the output accordingly, or am I wrong?

[Hman]

Ahem. No.

[Hman]

Here's why.

On AC you don't actually get such a thing as reversed polarity as the polarity switches between the Live and Neutral wires at a rate of 50Hz (if I remember correctly). That's where the term Alternating Current comes from. Thus any appliance designed to plug in to a mains socket is designed with this in mind.

Practical experiment for you: Take say a drill or a grinder or something with a rotating motor and a 2 point plug. Plug it in and start the machine note orientation of plug and direction of rotation. Now turn the plug around and turn the machine on, you'll notice that it still rotates in the same direction. See, it's like magic!

[Hman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternating_current

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_current

[StarBound]

Hman your so positive and so negative at the same time.

[Nuke]

There is a difference between live and neutral, but in most appliances it doesn't matter. At the transformer coming from Eskom neutral and ground is actually connected together. Ground is a non-isolated wire, so its keeping its "grounding" status wherever it touches the earth. Neutral is a isolated wire, and will off cause have an internal resistance. That is why at your house the neutral is usually at about 40-50v AC, its actually coming from your live wire, through whatever appliances you're running.
At most city houses you will never see the place where they are connected together, because that happens at the Main DB box coming from Eskom.
In a normal PC power supply it will not matter at all. But I had a problem once when we are running 2 UPS units connected to a bunch of switches and servers, some with redundant PSUs. One of the UPS units was connected incorrectly, where the neutral and live was reversed and it immediately tripped the earth-leakage. Swapping the polarity fixed that problem.

[THE_STIG]

I plugged a PC into an incorrectly wired outlet socket, I did not notice at first because other electrical equipment worked fine.
There was no explosion or smoke but the motherboard appears to be dead, even though the PSU is running fine. If I'm not mistaken a PSU can work with reversed polarity and adjust the output accordingly, or am I wrong?

What do you mean by incorrectly wired??

[Slimshaedy]

How can your plug point be incorrectly wired? Have you opened it up and checked? And did you only discover this now. Because who ever wired your house bought his wiremans license