"Odyssey of Idiocy" or "Don't Plug That There! -- Poof!"

H

Hurin

2[H]4U
Joined
Oct 8, 2003
Messages
2,410
Hi All,

Just a random story about how I'm an idiot. :D

First of all, a disclaimer. I've built many, many systems. I'm far from inexperienced. . . and I'm at a loss to explain how I could have been so careless as to do what I've recently done. But here goes. . .

The sequence of events goes thusly. . .

*Upgraded my motherboard to Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe seven months ago.

*Noticed that a USB port stopped working yesterday. iPod stopped working.

*Noticed that the USB port would work in DOS sporadically today.

*Decided to flash the BIOS. But as people will realize who know about this motherboard, clearing the CMOS jumper requires removing the 2nd video card (the jumper is underneath the video card). So, after flashing the BIOS on the motherboard in a random attempt at getting the USB port working. . .

*Removed the video card and noticed that the heatsink had a smokey film on it that wiped off.

*Looked below where the video card sits and found the source. . .

Seven months ago, I had plugged my case's front panel USB connector into the. . . FIREWIRE PORT!

How bone-headed can you get!?! I mean, that's like, rule #1 of wiring up your motherboard. . . don't get the pins wrong (much less the connector altogether!) on the USB ports.

Anyways, the connector partially melted. And I can't tell if anything on the motherboard itself fried, but it looks like something above the connector might have disintegrated. Here's the pics. . .

burn.jpg


burn2.jpg


Oh well. . . I guess this is a "live and learn" situation. . . but the problem with that is that I didn't actually learn anything. I'm always careful. . . and I knew this could happend if the connectors got mixed up. Guess I was in a hurry. :D

The weirdest part. . . either cleaning out some of the burn plastic debris or the BIOS update did in fact fix my other USB port as the they're all working again! Ta-da!

Best,

H
 
ha ha I pulled the same stunt with my old A8N SLI-Deluxe board. The firewire is dead but all the USB's still work fine :D :D :D
 
Dude, that's why they call them FIREwire cables! USB cables are not rated to handle the heat coming out of that header.

:p
 
lol i once plugged in the power plug for my fan controller into one of the fan monitoring ports...it smoked up real quick :D
 
it happens to the best of us... good thing nothing worse happened I guess?
 
Well, the bad news is that my problematic USB port is still problematic (it now detects devices that are plugged in. But they also spontaneously disappear and reappear without warning).

It also does look like a chip totally burned up and/or disintegrated on the board (or is hidden underneath the char). . . judging by this image from The Tech Report:

slots.jpg


Comparing that shot to the one above of the charring, it looks like that little green chip just above the red firewire connector is gone?

The good news:

3dMark06 score is still as expected. So it doesn't look like anything else was affected. Running some stability tests (looping Prime95 and 3dMark06, etc.). Hopefully that'll be cool too.

Fun, fun, fun. . .

I was thinking that I would probably get an NVIDIA G80 or two but hold out a bit for the motherboard and CPU situation to calm down a bit (quad core, better NVIDIA chipsets for OCing). . . but this has me motivated to get my system pristine again. I've gone from a tremendous sense of satisfaction with my rig to that nagging sense that something yet undiscovered might be terribly wrong. . . which means. . . time to upgrade! :D

H
 
Here's a (perhaps paranoid) question. . . can making a mistake like this (that demonstrably melted a connector and charred part of the motherboard) harm other components?

I'm about to replace almost my entire rig except my Sound Blaster X-Fi and hard drive. There's not much likelihood that these components might have suffered some low-grade damage that will bite me in the butt some time later, is there?

I should point out that I'm still able to loop 3DMark06 while running two Prime95s for 24 hours. So, things appear stable (though the machine hard locks if I try to do the same thing with 4x AA set in 3dMark06. . . but I'm not sure that's related).
 
Anything is possible.. but I think if you disable all USB in the bios you'll be ok.. for sure for a month or so until you get your new gear.. something C55 chipset and something G80 video subsystem. WEWT! :)
 
Yeah, anything's possible. . . so I guess I'm looking for some reassurance (due to my worry-wart nature) that there was likely no damage to the hard drive, X-fi sound card, DVD burner, and floppy (those are the only components transitioning over to the new rig).

I wish I knew more about electricity. :D
 
well, if your motherboard even passes power on diags, then things are likely ok enough to run with.. if there was danger of frying components I think your system would be very instable while running also... just keep all USB disabled in the bios and remove all plugs from any USB pin headers and any devices in the onboard USB slots..
 
Actually since it was a firewire header that fried, but you're having USB problems you've had at least some nonlocalized damage. If you're not suffering stability problems the rest of your board (potentially minus any unused parts) is probably OK you might still have gremlins lurking elsewhere.
 
Hurin said:
Comparing that shot to the one above of the charring, it looks like that little green chip just above the red firewire connector is gone?
Click to expand...

That little green chip looks like a resistor to me, but I cant be for sure. You would have to desolder one from a different board and check to see exactly what it was, or hope tech support knows (I Doubt that).
 
Well, I just hope the "gremlins" didn't travel up my SATA cables into my hard drive. . . or across my PCI bus to my sound card (x-fi). It's probably very unlikely. . . but from now on, whenever I have any odd behavior, I'll supsect all the parts that aren't going to be replaced in the upcoming upgrade.

Almost seems worth it to just get another hard drive and upgrade the x-fi to the one with the external bay. . . just for piece of mind. :D
 
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