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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: the_leander on November 11, 2003, 02:49:16 AM
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Bought a dandy little ECS K7SOM motherboard, onboard graphics, sound and lan, came with a cpu on board and was what I was after, a nice cheerfull little board that has a cpu included in the bundle.
Ok you might say that buying such a system was a mistake in itself, and you may be right, but I've got a gaming rig, its big, loud and drinks up more juice then my old C=1940 monitor ever did. What I was after was something phisically small (its a micro-atx board) and quiet. I got this, or so I thought, I put it in the case I bought for it, plugged the atx power connector to the board, power and reset buttons, and led's... so far so good, but being me I thought what the hell and turned it on... just as well really that I did... as soon as the power went on, the fan started up, and the power led lit up, good start... then two or three seconds later a light caught the corner of my eye - one of the solder joints on the board was in flames! Ripping out the mains connector the thing died down... I pulled the board and will be taking it back tomorrow...
Just a quick question, has anyone else had something this extreeme happen to them when setting up a computer?
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I sure have!. I have seen a P2 233 P6LX-A Rev 1 burn through all layers of the board with its inductor coil melting copper and fiberglass as it goes!. Twice actually. two of the same model motherboards. Makes a hell of a stink too.:))
Oh, just in case, don't buy one :))
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Er...no.....
I did see an old XT falling from a balcony.....a few times ;-). Try it, makes you feel great!
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I saw the plastic casing of a NB on an old TX board explode. Chunk'o'chip everywhere. Another interesting story that I heard once was about a tech from one of my former workplaces repairing a monitor. Apparently a capacitor discharged and shot of the board, it flew past his head and imbedded in the brick wall behind him.
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There was this incident when I was studying electrical engineering...a couple of students were busy building some project and were charging a battery or something IIRC. It resulted in the battery exploding, creating a nice dent in the ceiling and a black worktable :-).
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hehe, I'm glad I'm not the only one to have this happen to me :-D
The thing that got to me the most is that between the seconds that it took me to take stock of the situation and me pulling the plug, the fan and led were still spinning and lit up respectively!
And the smell.... kinda reminded me of ozone, or the smell a model train gives off after its been running for a while...
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@the_leander.
In relation to K7 motherboards, I have never bought anything outside of ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte brands and only limited to NVIDIA and VIA chipsets. thus I haven’t seen any scenarios that you have describe.
ECS K7SOM… a SiS740/962L chipset as I recall... My last SIS based solution was from Pentium II era e.g. BX Pro (5595) junk.
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In relation to K7 motherboards, I have never bought anything outside of ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte brands thus I haven’t seen any scenarios that you have describe.
Well my gaming rig is an ECS K7S5A and quite frankly its a beast, never had a days problem with it and its running with an overclocked cpu in a warm room, being ritually abused by my playing high end games on it via windows 2000pro. I cannot dis the k7s5a because it is a wonderful motherboard, that said, the reason I went for the K7SOM was because it shares many of the componants the K7S5A has (north/southbridge etc)... the only real differences being the inclusion of the SiS740 embedded graphics chip and lack of sd-ram slots and an agp connector.
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Had a cap blow in a monitor we were burning in once, which in turn set the ceiling on fire.
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Well my gaming rig is an ECS K7S5A and quite frankly its a beast, never had a days problem with it and its running with an overclocked cpu in a warm room, being ritually abused by my playing high end games on it via windows 2000pro.
I cannot dis the k7s5a because it is a wonderful motherboard,
That’s nice hear in relation to the experience with that particular motherboard.
that said, the reason I went for the K7SOM was because it shares many of the componants the K7S5A has (north/southbridge etc)... the only real differences being the inclusion of the SiS740 embedded graphics chip and lack of sd-ram slots and an agp connector.
Its either ECS has dropped the ball in regards to quality assurance OR somebody/something has damaged your K7SOM motherboard during transit to you. There's a greater chance that the value end motherboards may be fitted substandard components.
IF it’s under warranty one should RMA the board for a replacement.
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ECS are great value for money motherboards, they are generally good overclockers as well, but not the best, Abit has taken that title. As for manufacturing quality, Asus are the best with DFI coming second. For some reason, people can't get enough of MSI in the states and Toms Hardware rate them as being excellent manufaturers, from what I've seen, they are a load of crap, but thats just my opinion, who am I to question Toms Hardware :-?
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Har har! I've never seen a PC motherboard fry (except for those Athlon videos on TomsHardware), but I did have a pretty horrible experience with a Fuji C-41 film processor.
Where you load the film into the machine, there's a large cover that swings open, and there are wires along the door that let the machine know if the cover is open or not. Well, Fuji engineers decided to tape the wires right against the hinge. After a while ( a year or so after we bought it), the insulation on the wires wore away, and caused a short circuit. The wires on the door weren't carrying much voltage, as they were flimsy little wires like those that you see on CPU cooling fans, but they did cause the machine to stall. We then smelled something horrible, and realized the machine was in trouble. We unplugged it and called a technician to come in and fix it.
When he came in, he took off the cover of the machine and found the motherboard was fried. Literally. For some reason, he assumed the problem was a power regulator on the mobo itself, and just swapped the motherboard. Leaving the cover off, he turned it back on.
Things were going well for an hour, until he opened the door to load a leader card. As soon as he did, we heard a small pop (a fuse), and after a couple seconds, a HUGE arc of electricity about two feet high shot out of the motherboard, blinding everyone in the lab. I have no idea how much power was in that flash, but it blew a hole in the mobo, melted the surrounding plastic, and stank out the place for a few days. The technician later admit that it was the short in the loading cover wires that blew a fuse and shorted out the machine's power supply. They had to replace half the machine because of the burn damage. The poor technician was also standing right in front of the mobo when it happened. I have no idea how he survived, and managed to pull the plug.
Some of these machines are so badly engineered, they make MS-DOS look like UNIX.
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Bought a dandy little ECS K7SOM motherboard, onboard graphics, sound and lan, came with a cpu on board and was what I was after, a nice cheerfull little board that has a cpu included in the bundle.
heh, I was planning on getting this motherboard for a friend of mine. I typically stick with ASUS boards, but they don't make a board quite like this one, and for that price. Anyway, keep us posted on the outcome!
- Mike
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I've seen yellow/orange flames come from an expansion card, I've seen the smoke let out of a computer. And I've seen sparks come out of my A2000 PSU.
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Its either ECS has dropped the ball in regards to quality assurance OR somebody/something has damaged your K7SOM motherboard during transit to you. There's a greater chance that the value end motherboards may be fitted substandard components.
quite possible and may even be a bit of both (more than likely given the quality of mail "carriers" in this country), it surprises me even now, some 8 hours after the fact, that this board litterally fried... Another point I'd add is that the board itself (minus the cpu) costs about the same (give or take £5) as a K7S5A does, sadly, I can't find any of them locally and really can't be bothered with some of the online retailers I've dealt with in the past (No matter what I've bought, something has ALWAYS been wrong with what I recieved from the various places I've tried, hence my falling back to local bricks and morter merchants).
IF it’s under warranty one should RMA the board for a replacement.
I bought it at a shop called Maplin Electronics (a major retailer of electronic stuff throughout the uk), they're a big firm and very good with their customers so I don't forsee any trouble with getting a replacement.
What a way to go though hehehe.
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Had a cap blow in a monitor we were burning in once, which in turn set the ceiling on fire.
Ouch! Nasty stuff.
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heh, I was planning on getting this motherboard for a friend of mine. I typically stick with ASUS boards, but they don't make a board quite like this one, and for that price. Anyway, keep us posted on the outcome!
Will do boss :-D
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Just a quick question, has anyone else had something this extreeme happen to them when setting up a computer?
Not first-hand, but we once received a DEC PC server, a big honking thing on wheels, roughly the size of two mid-towers side by side. Booted up and ran Windows NT without complaining. However, upon inspection of the innards, we found a 2*2 cm area on the motherboard which was burnt out. As you touched it, burnt PCB crust fell off. Nevertheless, it worked without complaining. DEC quality.
On the Amiga side of things, I've had a SCSI ribbon cable catch fire. Just the cable, just one of its 50 leads, but burning with a large flame. Luckily, the controller survived, but the drive was discarded.
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Just a quick question, has anyone else had something this extreeme happen to them when setting up a computer?
I've had a Power supplies blow up on me a few times.
Customers forget to tell you when they have dropped a coin or a ball bearing in the PSU.
The loud bang really makes you jump. :shocked:
I have also seen a board burn up because a friend turned on his PC without inserting the memory properly. :roll: :rtfm:
Some Gigabyte boards have something called AntiBurn just for this reason. :roflmao:
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Some things I've experienced:
- Swapped +5 and +12V in an A590 SCSI controller. Everything looked ok, but then suddenly all 16 memory chips let out a thin wisp of smoke simultaneously, as if they were taunting me :-) Luckily nothing else fried but the RAM.
- A friend of mine brought me a PC that "just stopped running". I plugged it in and BOOM, lots of sparks out of the PSU. He had left the power switch in the on position when the PSU automatically shut itself down..
- The Dell Latitude CPi has a type fault that fries the CPU.. Well, my CPi did this too.. I was debugging it and running it without the keyboard.. Ok, I reseated the CPU and powered the beast up again, and whoa, again quite a few chips smouldered to ashes before my eyes.. Bye bye CPU module, bye bye motherboard.
- My C1942 suddenly started flickering and then the picture faded into a line. At the same time I saw smoke coming out of the ventilation grille on the side of the monitor casing.. I quickly powered down, but the monitor was fried.. Luckily the last finnish Amiga repairman was able to get it running again.
There's been others, but those were among the most memorable..
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It's better to burn out than fade away! :-D
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Yup - all this sounds very familiar :-(
(a) My A2000 recently died - one of the diodes popped, and gave out a smelly wisp of smoke.
(b) I've (mis-)connected a power lead to a floppy drive - offset by one pin. The wires melted together into a stinking mess. The drive still works, though! :-)
(c) I've destroyed an old A1200 memory card - sparks and smoke everywhere! The A1200 is OK, but the card isn't (obviously!)
I don't think that I've done much else that's too stupid - a lot of the mistakes were from trying to fit things into a towered A1200... not very good visibility, difficult to move around and align things... recipe for disaster :-)
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erm. . .guys, what's about a little travel to Lourdes! :-)
Ciao
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Several years ago I was putting together a Pentium MMX200 system. I had the case lying on its side when I first powered up. The thing was dead, apart from the LEDs and fans.
Suddenly there was a loud bang and something whizzed past my ear. As I was reaching over to disconnect the power, to my shock and amazement, the PC beeped and then started to boot up!
Examination of the board revealed an electrolytic capacitor that had been soldered in the wrong way around. Presumably this caused the 5V power to be low, so the system wouldn't boot. Once the offending component had blown itself off the motherboard, full voltage was restored, and the system proceeded to boot!
I was very lucky not to get struck in the eye by the capacitor.
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I have never seen a PC burn up, but my first PC back in '97 had a very low quality 12x CD-ROM in it. It forgot one time to spin down the CD before opening the tray. The CD flew out of the drive, went right by my head like a frisbee from hell and hit the wall on the other side of the room, making a nice little hole in it.
I also had a few LEDs explode years ago in an electronics lab in school when I forgot to put in current limiting resistors. Sounded kind of like a series of firecrackers and the smell was quite bad. No fire but black soot all over the thing.
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@A4000Bear:
I witnessed a capacitor failure similar to that mny years ago. Back in the late 1960s, tantalum electrolytic capacitors were the ant's pants, they were used in all expensive equipment because of their extremely low series resistance.
The tech next to me was trying to figure out why a power supply was not working. Something was hot, and he was leaning over it, trying to sniff his way to the hot component when one of a series of big tantalum electros exploded in his face.
He wasn't hurt, just startled, but his glasses were covered in molten tantalum and had to be replaced. Without them, he would have been blinded, no doubt. After that, he never peered into a faulty supply again.
tony
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UPDATE:
I got the replacement home about an hour ago, plugged in all the cables etc and the second unit went up, same place as before. Am now going to take the lot back and get a refund, I'll not be getting another one of these boards again. Its a real shame as I do like ECS, but I wont be buying another one of their all in one boards again.
@ Glaucus
Don't buy this board, I don't know if it was a couple of duds or the psu is incorectly wired, but either way, is it worth going through this to find out for sure?
Ye Gads I'm p***ed off right about now.
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There's been others, but those were among the most memorable..
Ummm... mental note: Don't let Jope touch any on my hardware!!! ;-)
- Mike
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Dude, at the risk of going DoomMaster on you, ECS boards are junk.
For the price of your headaches, you could pick up a niiiice nForce based AMD board or if you've got the $$$ and want the reliability and stability, go with an Abit or Asus intel board.
I just got an Abit BH7 (older board, but noted for reliability and stability) and am slowly building a new system around it. Totally new, too. This current box, while not "pokey" by any standards, is being passed on to someone else (800mhz PIII, gig of RAM, 70gb HD, etc.)
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Glaucus wrote:
There's been others, but those were among the most memorable..
Ummm... mental note: Don't let Jope touch any on my hardware!!! ;-)
- Mike
In Finland we have this saying - things happen to those who do..
I've only fried a few pieces of HW due to my own error - the rest have just given up the ghost due to a component failing. :-)
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Wow thats nutz! I havent seen it before on anything new. I have done it to a few systems messing arround to see what results would happen though.
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When I was on industrial placement, 2 years ago, i was assigned to do some pc support stuff for a month or two.... I managed to ruin a cpu.... static charge of electricity.... thankfully they didn't deduct it's cost off my salary!
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ECS boards are junk.
And as I said to someone else, my prior experience with an ECS board says otherwise. Never had a days problem with my K7S5A ever.
For the price of your headaches, you could pick up a niiiice nForce based AMD board
And end up having to get another graphics card anyway becuase of BeOS's poor support for the nforce boards (some work, some simply don't, no matter what you try doing with them...) thanks but no thanks, I don't have the patience or the time to be farting around with a dozen different models of essentially the same board in the vain hope that one *might* work...
$$$ and want the reliability and stability, go with an Abit or Asus intel boar
Yeah, All I need is about double the cash I have and I'd be able to get one of them... And then theres the point of well I got this great board, but I can't run BeOS on it, so its junk... my primary concern in getting this board was compatability with BeOS, without that, the board is worse then useless to me.
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Hooked my old 1960 monitor up to a friends A3500 (with CS/CV set to double the video output or something) and it made the same sound as popping popcorns for about 3 sec before we got the power off and it went quiet while all that special blue smoke left the chips in the monitor. Needless to say it was stone dead after that. :-(
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And as I said to someone else, my prior experience with an ECS board says otherwise. Never had a days problem with my K7S5A ever.
Ditto, except the battery.
Having said that though, the ECS mobo in my parents' PC is really poor :-(
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Just a quick question, has anyone else had something this extreeme happen to them when setting up a computer?
Yup i had a floppy drive catch fire enough to cook marshmellows on :-o
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:-o What are you guys doing to your 'puters to make them explode and things?! ;-)
Worst I've ever managed was blowing up a 128K ZX Spectrum+ by plugging the wrong DC adapter in the back. A pop and an unpleasant burning smell, nothing too spectacular. Replaced the blown chip but it never worked again :-(
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Not a mobo, not even a computer, but.....
When I was 17 I drove round to a friend's house, as he'd agreed to help me fit my car stereo head unit and CD changer (almost 400 quid's worth). I asked him because he had taught himself A-level electronics (succesfully I might add, he got an A) and he had a multimeter, and the wiring loom in the car was a complete maze. Within seconds of having the thing installed smoke poured out of the dash ('console' in US?).
One thing I learned that day (and have since confirmed) people who are good at theory (such as in my Physics dept) are not always so good at the practical side of things!
I also had a capacitor blow up in my eye at an electronics club at mjy school, because some tit had it connected to a dynamo that he was cranking like crazy...
I was lucky!
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I would not buy ecs for cheap motherboards i would try an asrock its a division of asus. My pc has an asus motherboard and its great i had a jetway which was very good a while ago. my msi was good to start with but something went wrong with it , Msi are crap. :-)
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2ND UPDATE
Just got back from maplins, they refunded me the money for the ram without problem, but because it was a second return, they had to send the mobo and case to headoffice for testing, once its verified that there is a problem I should get my money back or a refund, if they find that even with the scorched componant it still works ok, then I get it back with little return...
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I have not had this happen with a motherboard... But i have had other cases: Monitor that suddently started coming thick PINK smoke from, a printer that exploded with flame shooting straight up, pc speakers that exploded with thick gray smoke coming out of one of them.. The printer was worst, smelled AWFUL
edit:
oh yeah... forgot my seagate disk.. suddently went up in smoke :-(
Also got myself a nice hercules kyro board a few years back.... worked great for the first 10 hours i got it until i was going to use the tvout.. as i changed to dual view it worked for 10 seconds before the screen went black and board started smelling weird... never got it replaced, even though the board was new... :-(
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I got the replacement home about an hour ago, plugged in all the cables etc and the second unit went up, same place as before. Am now going to take the lot back and get a refund, I'll not be getting another one of these boards again. Its a real shame as I do like ECS, but I wont be buying another one of their all in one boards again.
That is extremly weird... you sure they was not a shortcut somewhere? maybe some metal/screw sticking out from the case? or something psu that is fuc*ed? It is extremly weird that 2 motherboards would do the exact same thing
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I forgot all about my old A500!!
I had an A500 with a brick PSU, that my idiot brother would use the switch on to reset the computer by flipping it off then on again really quickly because he was to stupid to remember ctrl-Amiga-Amiga for a reset. After what must have been several weeks of doing this I actually saw him do it and screamed at him about it. Within two days, I turned it on and sparks started showering out of the venting on top, and melted the casing. Wheee fun!
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('console' in US?)
Both terms are commonly used, 'dashboard' is more commonly used for part that runs below the windshield, and console is more common for the part(if used) that runs between the front 2 seats. :-)
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That is extremly weird... you sure they was not a shortcut somewhere? maybe some metal/screw sticking out from the case? or something psu that is fuc*ed? It is extremly weird that 2 motherboards would do the exact same thing
That had occured to me, but I went over the case for over an hour and I couldn't see anything physically wrong with it.. It could be an electrical fault but quite frankly I'm stumped on this one. Guess I'll find out when Maplin's head office gets in touch with me...
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Yup; I've had the resistors near the video out on an A1200 m/b in flames in front of me.
(Rewiring an Amiga -> SCART lead and got the 12V line shorting across the RGB lines)
Was most surprised and it was a reliable board until then. It still works, but I have to use RF with that one now.
I'm glad to hear someone else has had a good experience with a K7S5A - mine's great, although running @ 100MHz at the moment - not sure whether it's the RAM or the (not good) heatsink on the northbridge that's at fault.
I'll try again when I get some DDR RAM for it.
Oh, yes. I've also burnt myself on an IDE cable!
Was rearranging the IDE devices on a 4way adaptor for a different A1200, turned it back on and everything got hot. Definately damaged Gayle (or whichever runs IDE) on that one - it won't boot from IDE or if there's an accelerator attached.
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What a pain having to wait most places i have taken stuff back to have just given a replacement. :-)
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Ive kind of damaged a Microvitec multiscan monitor on my A1200 by accidentally selected the A2024 resolution form Workbench. The screen went black and blue for a few seconds, and the monitor made noises like popping popcorn before I reset the A1200. The monitor still works, but now has a yellowish tint, which can be resolved by a bang to the side of the monitor (not very technical I know! :-o ). The problem becomes less as the monitor warms up.
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Glaucus wrote:
Bought a dandy little ECS K7SOM motherboard, onboard graphics, sound and lan, came with a cpu on board and was what I was after, a nice cheerfull little board that has a cpu included in the bundle.
heh, I was planning on getting this motherboard for a friend of mine. I typically stick with ASUS boards, but they don't make a board quite like this one, and for that price. Anyway, keep us posted on the outcome!
- Mike
One could try ASrock brand i.e. it’s a subsidiary of ASUS for the value end market…
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I'm glad to hear someone else has had a good experience with a K7S5A - mine's great, although running @ 100MHz at the moment - not sure whether it's the RAM or the (not good) heatsink on the northbridge that's at fault.
move the sd stick to the port closest to the edge of the motherboard, I found it stopped kicking off after that... and it only happens when it played games under windows?!
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What a pain having to wait most places i have taken stuff back to have just given a replacement
I figure they're just covering their own backsides in this, it stops people burning out maybe as much as a dozen boards before giving up... either way so long as I get either my cash back or a system that is actually proven to operate I don't much care either way. That said, if they send me back the board thats burned out for whatever reason I'll be very miffy'ed
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The same thing happened to my 1084s...
The display got shrinked to a line, poof, BANG, poof,
*BANG*.
ALL the caps in the power supply were blown...
And when I replaced them, the LMs said *HELLO!*,
by blowing up... :-)
Once, I wired a large capacitor and blew it up off the
balcony to annoy a stupid neighbour... :-)
I've also seen PCBs catch fire and *FELT* a PSU make a nice discharge on my finger... It was painful
but fun, watching a spark between my finger and
2 contacts... (No, I didn't TOUCH).
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Ive have burnt ide cables to the stage they melted and burnt most the plastic off of them.Done two ide interfaces in the cables must have been damaged and shorted together. My a1200 tower still works perfect as well although i did have to resolder the one ide interface as copper link bourned as well but even that is still working ok. :-)