TPOWER I45

Associate
Joined
25 Oct 2009
Posts
7
Location
Penzance
Does anybody have this MB?

I've had it for about a year and found an irritating problem with the SATA conections. They are on the side of the board rather than top down. I have a Lian Li case and found that the HD cage just nudged the connectors by a few ml's. Not enough to knock them out, but enough with the thermal expansion and contraction, over a few weeks they would start to move out of true.
It took me a while to work out what was going on, blue screen of death, very slow start up and down. Then i would lose the DVD and hard drives one by one, but they would appear again after a reboot, sometimes. After a clean install of the OS (which did nothing) I unplugged then plugged the SATA leads back in, and the PC ran sweet as a nut, for few weeks, then it started all over again. Eventual after tiring of this I removed the HD cage completely and mounted the HD's just below the optical drives, luckly the Lain Li case has plently of space.

Now the problem is almost gone, but instead of weeks it takes months for the SATA leads to work loose. I can fix it, but is this a design flaw with this MB? or do I have a bad example? Has anybody else had this problem?
 
Hi and welcome to the forums. The thing is that most decent motherboards have the sata ports aligned this way these days as it makes cable routing easier. My DFI has them this way around and they are fine in my Lian Li PC-P50B. I am quite surprised that yours are so close to the hdd cage.

On a side note, whereabouts in Penzance are you? I grew up in Penzance (Adelaide Street) before my folks moved to Newlyn when i was a teenager. Moved away when i was 23 to join the RAF. I get home occasionaly but find it too expensive to live there now. :(
 
Hi, I moved here about 6 years ago. I used to live in a rented flat in Queens Terrace, but I have moved out to Pendeen about 3 years ago. My Lian Li case is about 10 years old, so the design may have altered slightly. I have had about 4 or 5 MBs in it over those years. I like the idea of upgrading bits of it now and then. It also looks ok and they are great to work on, as you know.

It is so old that I think the first OS was win 98SE, XP and then vista. I have just upgraded to win 7. This OS seems fine apart from a few driver problems on boot up occasionally, but nothing too drastic.

When I say the the SATA leads touch the cage, I do mean by a ml. It just about nudges the leads. As I say it took me a while to work out what was going on. I actually changed the leads from the “click in” ones, to normal that made things better. But now after taking out the cage, all I have to do is take the case side once every few months and re-plug them in and all is well. I don’t really mind. I can brush out any dust, and check other components. I had a bad short about a year ago, that fried everything. Even the plastic fan over the cpu was a bit melted, it smelt bad! Lucky I had a couple of backup usb drives. So I tend to be a bit more cautious anyway.
 
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