Easy way to fry your new industrial motherboard, SCSI, etc

[blakerwry]

Well, Monday I found a very easy way to fry your new $500 industrial PC motherboard, 10k SCSI drive, and an IDE CD-ROM too.

If your motherboard comes with a very cheap 4pin molex to 4pin Pentium4 power connector simply connect the molex connector upside down on 1 lead and right side up on the other. "This can't be done, the connectros are keyed!" you say... Na, the poor tolerences of the cheap cables will let you do this to your heart's content. Simply fireup the PC and you'll let the ghost out instantly.


Sadly this is the 2nd time in my computing carrer that I have damaged anything.. the 1st was when I inserted a 486 CPU backwards in a socket 2 motherboard.. That time it cost me $0.50.... this time the damage was worse.


The good news is the motherboard was replaced, the $500+ in RAM still works, and the 3.2GHz CPU is still alive and we have a spare 10k.6 drive.

 

[sechs]

Maybe you should invest in an ATX12V PSU?

 

[blakerwry]

yeah, but that would amount to over $300 for dual redundant hostswap PSU that meets our needs. The current PSUs cost more than that, however are not ATX 1.2 compatible. The converter was deemed sufficient.

 

[MaxBurn]

Man that's worse than my bad habbit of just not plugging in hard drives and wondering why they don't show up on post. I get concerned over jumper settings and cable routing and just forget to put the power on there sometimes.

Did the connector at least have color coded wires, or were they like all black?

 

[ddrueding]

Re: Easy way to fry your new industrial motherboard, SCSI, e

Sadly this is the 2nd time in my computing carrer that I have damaged anything.. the 1st was when I inserted a 486 CPU backwards in a socket 2 motherboard.. That time it cost me $0.50.... this time the damage was worse.

IIRC, this was my first disaster as well. Was the socket 2 the one that supported 486 and 586 chips (therefore not being keyed to prevent a misaligned 486 chip? I remember looking at the top of the CPU when I first fired it up (no heatsink in those days) thinking "cool, they embedded an LED in the processor" as whatever poor unsuspecting pin found itself in the power position.

I've had quite a few expensive disasters since, but that was the neatest one.

 

[blakerwry]

Man that's worse than my bad habbit of just not plugging in hard drives and wondering why they don't show up on post. I get concerned over jumper settings and cable routing and just forget to put the power on there sometimes.

Did the connector at least have color coded wires, or were they like all black?

It was color coded, that's how I noticed my mistake... unfortunately it was too late.

 

[Pradeep]

My first power supply mistake was when I was assembling my shiny gold Pentium66 (with fuzzymath). Slipped it into a Intel mobo with those new fandangle PCI slots, and put the two halves of the PSU connector together. Sadly, no-one ever told me that the black cables sit together.

Fortunately no damage was done.

 

[blakerwry]

yup, I've ehard that one before... very poor design to not have keyed connectors... I really like IDE for its double keyed connectors.

 

[blakerwry]

Well, today we found out that are expansion cards were fried as well...

One wrong connector: $6,000 damage.

 

[Bozo]

My worst disaster didn't involve a power supply, but the CPU.
I was trying to change the heat sink on a P4 3.0GHz CPU. The original heat sink was installed with a generic white heat sink paste. Apparently it glued the heat sink to the CPU and when I went to pull it off, the CPU came out with it. This ripped a couple of pins out of the CPU. The motherboard was also trashed as the CPU socket was damaged.

But that's nothing compare to $6000 in damages from an adaptor


Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[blakerwry]

funny, I had something similar to that happen just the other day with a p4... no pins came out and nothign was damaged though...

 

[Bozo]

The CPU I was pulling out was a Precott. I wonder if the absurd amount of heat from the CPU caused the thermal paste to glue things together :?:


Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[blakerwry]

That's definately going to encourage me to use good arctic silver paste instead of the stock bubblegum or cheap white paste.

 

[MaxBurn]

I'm 80% sure I fried my very first Athlon 1000 by using a heatsink with the pink bubblegum stuff under it.

Put it together turned it on and got the BIOS screen entered the BIOS setup and started setting things up. About 10 seconds into it the system hung. Reset it and never got POST again. Heatsink had a good contact pattern on it. Voltage and speed were auto configured. RMA'd the CPU with the retailer and scraped the bubblegum stuff and used thermal compound, no problems.

I was informed by the company I bought it from that the pink bubblegum stuff is suposed to melt and get a good contact with the CPU, in my case it aparntly was to thick or something and instead insulated the CPU for a couple seconds and cooked it. They covered it but werent happy about it.