Ever seen a motherboard litterally burn out? I just did....

[the_leander]

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?

[SHADES]

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

[odin]

Er...no.....

I did see an old XT falling from a balcony.....a few times ;-). Try it, makes you feel great!

[adz]

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.

[odin]

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 :-).

[the_leander]

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...

[Hammer]

@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.  

[the_leander]

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.

[Wain]

Had a cap blow in a monitor we were burning in once, which in turn set the ceiling on fire.

[Hammer]

 

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.

[adz]

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 :-?

[Waccoon]

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.

[Glaucus]

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

[iamaboringperson]

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.

[the_leander]

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.