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

[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.

[the_leander]

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

Ouch! Nasty stuff.

[the_leander]

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

[Iggy_Drougge]

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.

[GadgetMaster]

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:

[Jope]

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..

[takemehomegrandma]

It's better to burn out than fade away!  :-D

[Chunder]

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 :-)

[Framiga]

erm. . .guys, what's about a little travel to Lourdes! :-)

Ciao

[A4000Bear]

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.

[Casper]

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.

[tonyw]

@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

[the_leander]

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.

[Glaucus]

There's been others, but those were among the most memorable..

Ummm...  mental note: Don't let Jope touch any on my hardware!!!  ;-)

  - Mike

[B00tDisk]

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.)

[Jope]

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. :-)