Borked motherboard?

Muel

Muel

Muel

Soldato
Joined
26 Jun 2009
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Sheffield
Thought I'd test my old board earlier today. It was RMA'd but refused as they spotted damage I had missed.

Anyway, the trouble I had been having was due to something else, so today I decided to test my motherboard. I connected an old PSU, a beep code speaker, and a case fan, and booted it by shorting the power switch pins. It started up fine, however within about 20 seconds I could smell burning, and noticed the BIOS chip was getting incredibly hot. If i just licked the tip of my finger and touched it to the top of the chip, it boiled the spit off faster than I could move my finger away to see it, so I'm guessing it was well over 100C.

Furthermore, when I tried shorting the pins again to shut it down, it wouldn't work, even though I held it for 10 seconds.

In addition to this, the speaker didn't give out any beep codes, despite having no CPU, RAM, or graphics card installed.


I'm going to take a guess and say that this board, is dead. Just thought this might be a topic for discussion/lols. :p
 
dunno.

Back in the 6th form DT days i worked with PICAXE chips a lot, and when you put them into a socket the wrong way round (which i did more times that id care to admit to...), it would mean the ground pin was getting +5v and the +5v pin was connected to ground. Result? in the space of about 30 seconds after power on it goes from hot>smoking>molten.

If the above is done on breadboarding it tends to also melt that part of the breadboard as well. however, if it was noticed quick enough, the chips sometimes worked again once they'd cooled down

I presume by your response you did remove the bios chip at some point (:p), so when you mentioned burning bios chip, my first thought is that its in the wrong way round.
Does the notch in the chip line up with the notch in the socket?
 
It does now....

I smelt burning and it got incredibly hot, and I booted it twice?

Suppose all I can do is try and boot it with the bios in the correct way and see what happens... :/
 
Muel said:
It does now....
Click to expand...

haha, i think we can safely say the bios chip is borked then. Thing is, i cant really say if that the only reason its borked (ie, you go and get a nice shiny new bios chip, put it in correctly and watch that one frazzle itself as well)

i guess if you're interested in getting this board working again, get a new bios chip. they cant cost THAt much...
 
Well the board is actually bent, (I dropped it into the case), and has a deep scratch. Not really in the best of conditions. :P

I think the best course of action is to just let it rot. I have no use for it and it's worthless second hand, so not worth sorting really.
 
which board is it?

if you're not interested in it, i am suffering from lack-of-DT-itis (my desk is currently scattered with all kinds of pointless electronics in various stages of dismantling/building/modding), and might try and get it going again...
 
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Asus M4A79XTD Evo, I kinda fancy holding on to it to be honest, just in case I have a use for it one day and decide to have a crack at getting it going. :P
 
If it makes you feel any better Muel i'm pretty sure i've borked the board in my build. Don't know how but it doesn't take much.

Best of luck with yours
 
I bought a new board already pal, upgraded to a Gigabyte (better already) 890GPA-UD3H, so now I have SATA3, USB3 and supposedly it overclocks better.

Bad to hear about yours though, it is way too easy to do! My linux machine has some old Pentium 4 478 motherboard, and the abuse it's taken is unbelievable. This Asus board has been installed into my case 3 times and it's dead. Thats progress for you!
 
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