On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 21:30:00 -0600, "Don Burnette"
wrote:

P2B wrote:
Don Burnette wrote:
Here's one for the books, if anyone has any idea what I did wrong, I
would be curious to know, as I don't want this to happen again.

Did you remove standby power and take ESD precautions while working
inside the case? Failure to do either or both could have killed your
motherboard.

The chances of damage are very low - I know people who have built and
upgraded many computers with standby power on and a poke at the case
to discharge static electricity, and gotten away with it, but sooner
or later...

OTOH, it's more likely your motherboard just died naturally at the
same time you decided to install a new CPU. - cooling and warming
cycles stress electronic components, so they tend to fail at power on
or shortly thereafter rather than while running. The board might have
failed then even if you'd just shut down & taken the cover off to blow
dust out.

Another possibility is solder failure - the board always flexes a bit
during cooler installation, which can be the last straw for a bad
solder joint.


Yes, I took all the precautions that I usually do. Used my anti-static wrist
strap, made sure power was off and drained, etc.
Perhaps the board just plain failed at that time.
One thing that may have done it - I put the new cpu, heatsink, memory, etc
in while the board was still mouted to the slide in mb tray. This allowed it
to flex down a little as pushed memory in, etc.
Perhaps it just had a bad solder joint that cracked at that time - who
knows, I will be puzzled over that one for a while. Perhaps I should have
removed the mb from the tray and kept it on a flat surface.
That's almost surely the reason the board failed. I've gotten away
with replacing a heat sink without removing the board from the case,
but I knew at the time that it was likely to break something (I did it
because I didn't really care if I had to upgrade motherboards).

This new version2 is still running well, I am a little dissapointed as I
still can't seem to hit 200 mhz fsb or higher - I do have Corsair LL pc3200.
Perhaps I just haven't found the right memory timings yet.
I am running it at 7-3-3=2.5T. Mem voltage at 2.6, cpu core at 1.75 ( Barton
2600+ ) , with an 11 multiplier.
Even at 196 mhz fsb though, it comes up showing as an XP3200+.

Don Burnette





Ron