Crazy over heating cables. [Fixed...]

[darksun9210]

no no and thrice no! i thought this was only me!

the A4000T comes with an AT type power connector, and by design the actuall contact area between the pins off the mainboard, and the connector "shoe" in the plug is a very small area. (about 2mm by the width of a human hair)

loading this up with power sucking cards like 040's or (in my case) my PPC card and other various zorro cards, (see signiture below) would cause the plug to heat up due to the amount of current required by the mainboard to support all these devices running through a very small contact area.

hence power lead plugs melting burning and discolouration. i originally thought this was a software fault as it kept crashing, then after a couple of months after buying my CS-PPC it wouldn't boot at all. replaced the power supply, all fine and dandy for a while, then after a few months, same problem. took the machine to pieces to see what was up. and looked at the power plugs. burnt out on the 5 volt lines (the red leads if memory serves me correctly), to the point that the connectors in the plugs had burnt away completely.

fortunatly the mainboard was fine, i just wasn't too happy about going back to a 25Mhz EC030 and IDE drives for the sake of power problems. so i ended up cutting off the plugs, stripping the ends of the wires, and jamming them in the back of end respective pin on the mainboard. nice wide connection area. worked a treat forever. (till i sold the machine)

a more permanent solution would be to solder some flying leads off of the mainboard power connector, screwed into a block connector. the other side of the block connector would have the lines from the power supply screwed into it.

but yes. a heavily loaded A4000T mainboard will overload the AT power connecter. sad but true.

[darksun9210]

ok, lets see how the A2000 PSU does with the current draw i had on my A4000. i used to own an A2000, and sure, its nice, and i liked the design (especially the mouse keyboard and joystick ports at the front of the case...) just... erm well, you couldn't put a Zorro3 full motion video capture card in it and stuff video data to your hard disk(s) at 8-12Mb a second do get full DVD quality and expect your sound card to be able to stream sound to and from (for performance's sake) a drive on another scsi bus (bandwidth of around 8Mb a second) at the same time as WELL as generating two cybergraphics displays without a hiccup. sorry whats that? a 16 bit bus? memory limits? non ppc? non ultra wide scsi? no onboard IDE for cheap cd drives? functionality my friend, functionality :-D

ok so the A4000T was a nice machine, but could have been better thought out (i mean what was the point of having seperate video and I/O modules? why not have all the connectors on the back like normal and use the space for a couple of extra zorro slots? ;-)

but if your entire arguement is based on the quality of the CASE the machine comes in, not to mention basic functionality which is why i had an A4000T in the first place then so be it. i think we all know that the A2000 was designed and build when commodore had some cash, and the A4000 was the end of the line so the cash wasn't so available. so enuff. please. i just don't want to hear another 2000 vs 4000 argument. :-)

anyway, to re-iterate my original point. the A4000T mainboard power connector is FINE it can take lots and lots of nice juicy current.  :-D

its just the AT plug that bolts in is a pants PC design. :-(

so like i said. directly solder some leads to the power connector so you get a nice connection area onto the pins, and you will be fine. :-)

DO NOT do as i did and try to power the cyberstorm directly using an unregulated 5 volt line from the power supply to the cyberstorms 5Volt fan connector. everything went dark and i nearly s##t myself thinking i'd poped about a grands worth of kit. so went outside to have a smoke and calm down, came back, powered it on without the fan connector and all good. *phew*