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Old June 13th 21, 03:11 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Skybuck Flying[_4_]
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Posts: 480
Default Something weird going on with DreamPC from 2006, bad smellcoming from heatsink on north bridge chip ?

This was going to be my original posting, it tells a kinda funny story
about me smelling around like a dog, but as I wrote this I believed I
accidently connected two power cables to the same pci express
controller and power splitter cable but I no longer believe that,
because one was going to a harddisk, western digital SAN optimized
harddisk.

However now that I write this another hypothesis is that this harddisk
is drawing too much power or something and somehow causes southbridge
to overheat / Seems far fetched, anyway here is the posting which I cut
and stop at the end to not lead to wrong conclusion:

The impending death of Skybuck's DreamPC 2006 however fortunately have
backup motherboard.

Today I just noticed there was a strange smell coming from somewhere.

I noticed this smell for the past few days. I never suspected it to be
my DreamPC because it has been working for so many years.

I smelled like oil or plastic or some kind of car that smelled bad.

Today I finally decided to investigate it because it's sunday and the
air was unusually clean !

First I started sniffing myself, at first I believed it must be me,
lol, maybe bad body odeur.

But then I decided no... probably not I don't smell that bad, since
when would I smell like a dirty old oil leaky benzine leaking burning
car ?!?

Further more some idiot has been burning trash late at night around
23'o clock at night, and I usually computer during those times.

So that also contributed to a sort of cover up of this smell.

Then my down stair neighbour female has huge ammounts of parfum coming
out of her appartment/window.

Plus lots of busses, cars drive by and also lots of construction work
happening in the back during days.

Heavy machinery and re-converting of office building into expensive
apparments going on.

Anyway long story short, since it was so unusually clean air and my 3
big home appartment fans were spinning blowing out dirty air and
sucking in fresh air I dedided to do a "CRAZY" investigation anyway.

I felt like a crazy person pretending to be a dog, believing I wouldn't
find anything anyway.

But the oder seem to be coming from myself or my chair when I stood up
and went to the balkony.

So I figured I am dragging along some kind of air but where is it
coming from ?

So again started smelling in the bedroom, then hallway.

Then smelled my chair really good ?! Could it be poo-farts ? LOL I
cleaned this chair not so long ago.

Didn't quite smell like what I was smelling.

Then smelled the laptop, some plastig smell coming from it but that
wasn's it.

Finally decided to smell my DreamPC from 2006 upgraded throughout the
years !

And BOY ! Was I in for a shocker !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There was a very bad nasty smell coming from the PC.

I kinda recgonized it as some kind of burning plastic smell, possible
plastic van wires, fans or godforbid the motherboard PCB.

A burn-out/burn through might be happening ?!?! Something may be wrong.

So I immediately check the smell again, and yup can smell it real good.

Didn't clean it so long ago as I can remember, blew out a whole lot of
dust out of power supply and cpu cooler

so I was quite surprised ?! WTF could it be ?! WTF is wrong with it
this time ?! No way that the power supply is in failure mode ?!?

Compounding a little bit to the confusion is a recent power outage at
23:00 o clock in this city, not yet sure if it has something to do with
it but probably not.

So then I decide it's time to clean the PC once more and see if that
has any effect on the smell.

So indeed there was some dust/carpet in the cpu fan/heatsink/fins on
front and back but I couldn't imagine this was the culprit and it
shouldn't.

Blew out some more dust but it was minor.

I checked for dust in power supply with flashlight all seemed ok there
was some dust but not in huge quantities.

I also inspected the entire motherboard for as far as I could see for
any burn marks, with a flashlight, nothing !

There is one peculiar thing: the northbridge chip has a heatsink and it
is missing a ventilator, it kinda stopped spinning up and I believed it
wasn't necessary and it most like isn't necessary because the PC's
airflow is enough.

After reconnecting everything again. I noticed the case fans didn't
light up. Something was wrong. Perhaps I didn't notice this behaviour.

Is it humanly possible that I didn't notice the leds where off ? I am
not sure, can't remember clearly. Don't think so but not sure.

Then I fiddled a bit with the connectors on the back, they went
on/of/on/of/on so this connection wasn't super secure... it could also
be that some other connector on the motherboard were down because of
gravity or some other phenomenon.

Hoping that I solved the problem I turned on the PC again and I almost
immediately started noticing this burn smell again !

I wondered, maybe it's the USB 3.0 PCI Express Card, it came from a
****ty PC store and it is causing shutdown problems.

Might it is the cause of overheat.

I also touched the northbridge heatsink and I yelled: AAAAUUUWWWW ! It
was superhot !

I believed somehow the USB 3.0 PCI Express Controller/card may be
causing the north bridge to overheat or somehow it got fried.

So I remove the USB 3.0 PCI Express Controller/Card and as I remove it
I discover something shocking:

I connected not one but two power connectors to it ! So it was
receiving double power !

I didn't notice this when I connected it, it's kinda weird I will have
to take pictures to show how this happened.

There is this power supply able that had to go to the top of the DVD
drive which doesn't even work anymore but I decided to connect it
anyway.

And from this power supply cable it also connects to the x-fi elite
soundcard !

I didn't notice this cable was also directly connected to the power
supply, it's kinda hard to see with the rest of the cables in the way
and going dark, kinda dark.

So I completely forgot/miss understood that this cable was ALREADY
being powered.

So then I connected this extension cable/splitter to the USB PCI 3.0
Express Card and probably connected it twice to two different power
cables. One which I believed was necessary to power the card and one to
power the rest ?!?!?!?

(HINT: it wasn't connected to two power cables it just seemed like
that, one goes to harddisk and one goes to controller, so this posting
went wrong here but it is still amuzing, fortunately male and female
connectors prevent these kinds of mistakes happening as far as I know
?!?!? so it should be impossible to do ?! )

Does this sound like a familiar build mistake ?!?!?!

So most likely, power was being applied twice and feedback into the
motherboard via the USB 3.0 PCI Express Card ?!

I had to remove this ****ing card to be able to install windows 7 and
when I reinstalled it I must have improperly reconnected it ?!?!?

Holy****.

So all this time the motherboard was under double stress, double
powersupply.

Maybe this wasn't an issue as long as I didn't use the USB 3.0 PCI
Express Controller.

But now it is starting to make sense to me.

For example, I installed a test version of world of warships onto a usb
protable harddisk via my DreamPc because it can download faster thanks
to the gigabit network card.

This was 35+ gigabytes. So this must have stressed this entire setup
quite severe !

World of warships also have a very inefficient installation process
where it copies files double.

I also transferred a 500 GB virtual harddisk of music collection before
that ! Also heavily taxing this system ?!?!?

I now believed that what must have happened is that under this
especially insane world of warships load the north bridge chip has
fried too slightly.

Everything is still working as far as I can tell, but there is a
burning smell coming from the heatsink of the northbridge chip ?!?!?

This can't be good....

Even after removing the USB 3.0 PCI Express Controller I still noticed
this heatsink becomes unusually hot... enough to hurt my finger easily
in just a few seconds.

So I believe some PCB lines may have fried through and this is the
beginning of the end for this motherboard !

If I continue using this motherboard it's probably a matter of time
before this "short circuit" will fry the rest of it !

Maybe I could try removing this tiny little heatsink and maybe I will
see some kind of fried PCB lines.

But it might be on the inside ?!

This becoming a dangerous situation for my health (breathing this toxic
air can't be good) and also my data might be at slight risk ?!

I almost can't believe that such a stupid foolish mistake can be made
and was made by me... it's a really innocent mistake.

It's so weird I can hardly believe it.... but I know what I saw, there
was two power cables running to this ****ing splitter !

BUT WAIT

Before you blame it on my again ! THERE IS MORE !!!!! WEIRDNESSS ! You
are never going to guess this one !

GUESS WHAT IT IS BEFORE READING FURTHER !!!

^ STOP OF POSTING.

Here is was going to ramble/rant about male/female connectors getting
mixed but then I realized it wasn't and everything was fine... one
going to controller and one to HD but it was funny up to this point !

Bye for now,
Skybuck.