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Help diagnose system.

F

Fryguy8

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 26, 2001
Messages
1,707
Well, my comp broke, pretty hardcore.

Athlon1800+
epox 8kha+
crucial 256mb ddr
geforce2 mx (WOOHOO)
matrox millenia pci
random nic
sblive
enlight 300w psu.

Was playing counterstrike, all of a sudden I get a weird memory access error, comp freaks out and reboots, as it's rebooting I smell burning like REALLY hardcore (stunk up the entire house, I almost puked), and noted temperate of 50C on proc as I was racing for power button.

Take apart comp, inspect things, no visible burns. Turn comp back on, doesn't post at first (freezes at memory detection), reboot, and it hangs instantly after posting (right at the beginning of windowsxp boot), and the smell begins to come back. There's also a loud whirring noise Power off, back to thinking. First thought is to try and boot knoppix, maybe dead hard drive? Disconnect hard drive and try to boot knoppix. Get some random segfaults and it's unable to find a usable screen, so it halts. Segfaults suggest either bad proc or bad mem. So I run memtest86, which is apparently running fine, except for this very loud whirring noise, which I can only conclude is coming from the motherboard (towards the front of the case, hard drive and cd rom are disconnected). It is VERY loud, like audible from 2 rooms away and annoying. Somebody mentions maybe motherboard caps are about to burst, so I turn comp off. Think about things some more, and boot it again. Having probs with memtest this time, going slow/freezing. At this point I notice psu voltages are quite off, like .5 too high on 12 and 5 rails. So I pull out the psu and jump it. As I take it out I note that the smell seemed to be originating from there (couldn't tell before because it was so pungent and just seemed to instantly envelop the room). So I jump it (taking proper safety precautions, dedicated surge protector, fire extinguisher ready, etc). One of the fans doesn't come on (the exhaust fan), but the internal fan is fine. PSU runs for a few minutes cool to the touch, no problems.

So at this point I'm thinking that it's the motherboard. Since the motherboard is magically making weird sounds on a basically fanless system.

Any ideas? cuz I'm NOT replacing this motherboard, I'm just buying a new comp if it's broken, which I don't want to do because i want to wait for pci-e on amd.

I don't have parts available for swapping.
 
The only thing to do is to swap out parts until you find what fried.

I would hope it was the PS that died spectacularly, but with those kinds of voltages, it may have taken a few other components with it. Swap that out first and see what happends.

Good luck
 
A really bad smell would indicate the PSU. 50C isn't generally enough to fry a proc, its a pretty expected temp on some after a few hours of gaming. Have a friend that would let you borrow his power supply for a few minutes? Or a power supply tester (probably not)?
 
the smell was from the psu, so I jumped it and plugged it into the wall by itself, and it's running ok...

I'm thinking that the psu overvolted (checked voltages in bios and they were quite a bit high, .5 on the 5 and 12v rails), and took motherboard with it.
 
just open the case ... and you'll get to the general area where the burnt smell is coming from ... if you're lucky it will be visible ...
 
You might also want to consider removing the heatsink and inspecting your processor.
 
primea said:
just open the case ... and you'll get to the general area where the burnt smell is coming from ... if you're lucky it will be visible ...
Click to expand...


Read the posts, smell is coming from the psu, no visible damage. PSU works fine when manually jumped and plugged into wall by itself..
 
Fryguy8 said:
Read the posts, smell is coming from the psu, no visible damage. PSU works fine when manually jumped and plugged into wall by itself..
Click to expand...

The PSU also isn't being "used" in this situation. Take the cover off and inspect the wires, contacts and cards in the PSU.
 
OldGuy said:
The PSU also isn't being "used" in this situation. Take the cover off and inspect the wires, contacts and cards in the PSU.
Click to expand...

I agree. I also would not hook it back up into that system until you have tested the system with another power supply. If your potentially bad power supply has not killed any of your other hardware, you don't want to give it another chance to.
 
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