My BX-6 fried 2 CPU´s :( Anyone ever heard of something similar?

[Nuno]

Hi there guys

I´ve be away for a while, and the reason was just as simple as that: My PC entered standby mode and never woke up... may its soul rest in peace. The damn mobo went bad and it FRIED my poor celery. What hurted much is that it also fried a PIII 550 who belongs to a buddy of mine (who actually own a computer shop where I usually buy the stuff).

Those are the bad news.

The good news is that I went Athlon Gigabyte mobo and a little athlon 500 (I was very short on money). So far so good. The damn thing even works with my 250W generic power supply. The results are impressive so far (Went from like 73 fps to 102 in Q2). But I still have to check more to see if it´s really stable. And reinstalling windows would be a good idea.

But what I would like to know is WHY the mobo (abit bx-6) started frying cpu´s this way.... any ideas?

[Guyver]

A. Component failure (ie voltage regulator on motherboard) went bad
B. Power surge - via phone line, network card, power-plug, induced via lightning strike (coiled wires can induce a large current in coiled/spooled wires - I always tie my loose cables in figure 8's to prevent this)
C. Static jolt
D. Power Supply fluctuation/fried component
E. Overvoltage in CMOS/Jumper config for current CPU
F. Insufficient cooling for processor
G. AOG (Act of God)

These are the things that I can think of - although I know you were looking for a specific ABIT BX6 reason, I've got none....

Sorry if this is too general....

Guyver

[This message has been edited by Guyver (edited 17 January 2000).]

[Greebe]

Guyv, don't worry about EMF being induced into your wires... there's not enough wire there to even remotely have enough current induced into it and cause a problem.

[Warchild]

I know it's stupid, but you never mentioned what voltage setting you were using, nor if proper cooling was used. Asuming you know what your doing...I'll go stick my foot in my mouth.

Warchild

[Nuno]

Back again in business Man, this Athlon really rocks. If a 500 can do all this, it´s Athlon all the away from now on... BTW I´m using the Gigabyte GA-7IX mobo.

So, Greebe, finaly I´ve joined the AMD comunity

I was running a celery 300 at 450, 2.2v, thermal paste, decent heatsink and double fan. It was running stable for 1 year and an half. Ok, so I was overclocking the poor celery a lot, but if it went wrong, wouldn´t just the cpu die and let the mobo alone? But I guess it was a mobo failure, don´t know exactly what, maybe the voltage regulator, that simply fried my cpu and that poor PIII.

[Nuno]

BTW, the only glitches I have until now with the Athlon (besides it was hard like hell to find a dimm than worked fine with the 64 Mb one I had - 128 Mb now - finally!) are:
1 - Sisoft Sandra freezes the system when I try to access the system summary, mainboard information, cpu and bios information. All the benchmarks work fine.

2 - Windows 98 generic IDE drivers (with DMA enabled) are noticeably faster than the AMD 756 IDE drivers (rev 1.2x). That´s with a Maxtor 6800 plus 13 Gb.

Any ideas?

[Rohde]

The Sandra problem that you are having is very common (only the newer versions). I've tried it on 3 computers, and system summary, mainboard info etc. didn't work, but benches ran smoth. (2x K6-2 and an Athlon).

Torben R.

[Nuno]

Cool, then. I suspected it should be something like that. Never trusted sandra too much, it only seems to do right with "known" cpu´s. Like the multimedia benchmark and the memory bandwidth, yeah rigth, like the Athlon 500 had a 3dnow! fpu performance 40% less than the K6-3...