Motherboard/ Powersupply issues

[LordSmack]

A little history first. I have lost 4, count'im 4, gigabyte K8NS Ultra 939 boards. Every board was lost in the same way. The system was idle and I either plugged or unplugged a usb device. This has perplexed both myself and the tech for Gigabyte as all my other components besides the board and proc were left over from a old system. This last time I lost the board I checked my powersupply( a silverstone zues) with a testor and got a big fat warning stating there was no -5volt line!. I thought the board had F****d up my powersupply! I called Silverstone to see if the PS was RMA'able and to my supprise the tech said it doesnt have a -5volt rail. The tech told me without missing a beat that there was no -5volt rail on any of their powersupplies as the new atx standard didn't require it. I checked the lable while I was talking to him and sure enough the there was no -5volt rail listed. I told him about my usb issues without mentioning the board maker and he told me that if you owned a msi or gigabyte board you could short it out using a newer powersupply by most manufacturers because they had been slow to work the new standard. He didn't go into any more details but as I had been running a chaintech nforce 2 board on the powersupply for 5 months without an issue there seems to be a shread of truth to his claim. Can anyone with either an msi of gigabyte report similar problem to what I've had.

 

[kirbyrj]

The only issue I've heard about with the -5V rail and MSI boards is that the Neo4 Plat SLI (original revision because I heard they changed it) had problems (e.g. no sound) with the onboard Creative Sound Blaster Live when the -5V was not present. That being said, I never heard of one of them shorting out when the -5V was not present.