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

[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. :-)

[Acill]

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.

[Van_M]

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!

[the_leander]

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.

[Brian]

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. :-(

[mikeymike]

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 :-(

[redrumloa]

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

[that_punk_guy]

:-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 :-(

[Cyberus]

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!

[amigamad]

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. :-)

[the_leander]

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...

[Tomas]

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... :-(

[Tomas]

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

[Wain]

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!

[redrumloa]

('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. :-)

[the_leander]

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...