My motherboard seems to be dying.

McNum · Post by **McNum** » 2004-12-21 11:11pm

As the title says, my motherboard is most likely dying. Which in itself is bad, but if I only wated to say that it would have gone in the venting thread.

The thing is that this motherboard is displaying almost the exact same defects as the ones that killed the previous PC. Which stikes me as very, very odd. Basically the capacitors on the motherboard are popping their tops. Now the two PCs have very little in common. Most notable is the graphics card which was upgraded mid-life on the previous PC.

So the question is very simple: Could my graphics card be the real culprit in this case? Can a graphics card kill a motherboard?

It seems odd... But then again, it's a PC we're talking about... They do odd things at times.

Luckily the motherboard is only a little over a year old, so the warrenty will (hopefully) cover it.

But if I need to replace my GeForce Ti4200 what (cheapish) card would you suggest? I'm thinking GeForce 5500 or something like that.

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2004-12-21 11:28pm

I've got an ATI Radeon 9600. Good card for the money. But if you've got linux (like I) avoid ATI like the plauge. I'm still trying to set up 3D support for the fucker weeks after installing linux...

CDS · Post by **CDS** » 2004-12-21 11:45pm

McNum wrote:As the title says, my motherboard is most likely dying. Which in itself is bad, but if I only wated to say that it would have gone in the venting thread.

The thing is that this motherboard is displaying almost the exact same defects as the ones that killed the previous PC. Which stikes me as very, very odd. Basically the capacitors on the motherboard are popping their tops. Now the two PCs have very little in common. Most notable is the graphics card which was upgraded mid-life on the previous PC.

So the question is very simple: Could my graphics card be the real culprit in this case? Can a graphics card kill a motherboard?

I'm not an electrition or indeed a hardware expert - but could your problem be with the PSU or with the electricity supply?

Just a random thought...

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2004-12-22 12:27am

I'm with CD on this one. Power supply and/or power outlet. You running off a UPS, or just a garden-variety useless powerstrip?

Glocksman · Post by **Glocksman** » 2004-12-22 11:45am

How old were the boards?

A little while back the Taiwanese mobo makers were victimized by a supplier who sold them a large batch of defective capacitors.

It eventually became so well known among the enthusaist community that some mobo makers now make it a point to advertise '100% Japanese Capacitors' on their enthusiast boards.

The irony for me here is that I'm just old enough to remember when 'Made in Japan' meant cheap crap.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2004-12-22 01:03pm

Glocksman is correct -- there was a case of industrial IP theft gone horribly wrong (in this case, the fluid inside the capacitors) which lead to a very large batch of bad capacitors. You just had the bad luck to get two motherboards with poor capacitors.

McNum · Post by **McNum** » 2004-12-22 04:51pm

Let's see... The current board is a little over a year old and the previous is, I think, three to four years old now. From about the time where 1GHz was a lot.

I upgraded my graphics card in that one about a year before the previous motherboard died. It just seems "funny" that this one does the same stunt after a year as well.

Also it seems the three capacitors popped at about the same time. It went from "no problems" to "PC has trouble booting" very fast.

The reason i suspect the graphics card is that two of the popped capacitors can be traced to the AGP slot (by following the lines on the board) and that the most dominant POST code error is 17, which on my motherboard mens "Video Initializing".

Strangely enough once I finally get it to boot it seems to be a stable as ever. In fact I'm writing this post from the sick PC... Well that's computers for you.

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2004-12-22 04:58pm

what brand of motherboards have you been using? do you buy from the same manufacturer each time, or was it different ones? also, like the others said the power source might be a culprit, but it could be just as easily your brand.

McNum · Post by **McNum** » 2004-12-22 05:42pm

My current motherboard is an EPoX 4PDAI and I can't remember the name of the previous one. I think it was an Asus, but I'm not completely sure.

I do know that I switched from AMD to Intel with this one. So the motherboard architecture should be different.

I don't think it's the power supply. I got a new one with this PC. The old one wasn't powerful enough to power the new PC so I had it replaced.

Only the graphics card, the sound card (SB Audigy), the floppy drive, a DVD drive, a CD-ROM drive, and the harddrive transferred over to the new one. Motherboard, CPU, RAM, and Power Supply are all new (well a year old "new", anyway).

I started to notice the trouble a few days after I got me a DVD+/-RW drive. But that one replaced an old CD-ROM drive so power usage shouldn't have risen that much.

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2004-12-22 06:22pm

What brand is your power supply? The brand can have a lot to do with the quality... no-name PSUs tend to be of very poor quality (I had a brand-new one that came with a case that pumped unholy amounts of RFI back into the house power lines, wreaking hell with my dad's radios).

hmm... Epox... can't say that I really have heard much about their motherboards. However, in recent years I haven't had any problems with ASUS, Tyan, or MSI boards.

McNum · Post by **McNum** » 2004-12-22 07:22pm

I can't find a brandname on the power supply. I came with the tower, though. The tower is, according to the proof of purchase, a "Calvin 2011-4". That's probably not a brand name one, then.

But I'm curious... Why do you think it's the power supply? It's not even on my list of suspects, so what points towards the power supply?

Also... How do you test if the power supply is faulty? The popped capacitors are obvious on the motherboard, but is there any tell tale signs of a defective power supply?

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2004-12-22 07:36pm

McNum wrote:But I'm curious... Why do you think it's the power supply? It's not even on my list of suspects, so what points towards the power supply?

Electrolytic capacitors are not very tolerant of noise in their power supply. If the voltage exceeds what they're rated for, the electrolyte will boil and the capacitor will pop.

McNum wrote:Also... How do you test if the power supply is faulty? The popped capacitors are obvious on the motherboard, but is there any tell tale signs of a defective power supply?

Hook up a multimeter (if you don't know how to check for a bad power supply, you should get a local electronics geek to do it for you) and check to make sure that the voltages it's producing aren't flucuating too much. If they aren't, you can get popped capacitors and other such annoyances. A better way would be to hook it up to an oscilloscope and make sure the output is smooth, but most people don't have oscilloscopes handy.

At any rate, the better brands of power supply would be Antec, Sparkle, and a few others that I can't remember off the top of my head.

McNum · Post by **McNum** » 2004-12-22 08:18pm

Hook the power supply up... Hmm... That's possible. Tech geekiness kind of runs in the family. And since Christmas is around the corner I can get the help of a Civil Engineer in Electronics. That should about cover it. I don't think we can get an oscilloscope now, but multimeteres are plentiful here.

Power spikes does sound plausible. Would I in any way be able to see those while operating the computer? Like performance issues or something like tha?. I ask this because I have noticed some unexplained spikes in the performance from time to time. Mostly during video playback such as DVD movies or video files off the harddisk. (Yet another reason that the GeForce was the primary suspect at first. It's the only performance problem I've noticed.)

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2004-12-22 08:27pm

Forton, Sparkle, Antec and PC Power & Cooling are some of the reputable power supply manufacturers. This is not an exhaustive list by any means.

CDS · Post by **CDS** » 2004-12-22 08:29pm

McNum wrote:Power spikes does sound plausible. Would I in any way be able to see those while operating the computer? Like performance issues or something like tha?. I ask this because I have noticed some unexplained spikes in the performance from time to time. Mostly during video playback such as DVD movies or video files off the harddisk. (Yet another reason that the GeForce was the primary suspect at first. It's the only performance problem I've noticed.)

Generally, no. They just makes your hardware go bang if you're unlucky.

Get a surge protector.. they're not that much more expensive than normal 4-way plugs, so it's worth the money than to have to shell out for a whole new computer (it happens..)

McNum · Post by **McNum** » 2004-12-22 10:03pm

I looked up some more about the EPoX brand. Main homepage is www.epox.com but the international one has a .tw ending. I think that might be Taiwan. So, the "bad capacitor" theory gains a little. If that's the problem then a motherboard exchange should solve the problem. If not, then I need to find the real offender.

I've dug around a bit to see if I could find any brand name on the PSU. I found a holo-sticker on it. It says "COBA". I think it's a "COBA AP-350X (P/PEC)". I might have a letter or two wrong, it's partially obscured by the metal framework on the computer case. Does that name ring a bell?

Google comes up with a lot of reviews of it... in German. If you can read German then this is the beast. If you don't know German there's still a picture of it if you want to see it. So apparantly it's not a no-name, but the question then is... Is it a good name? The lack of English reviews could mean that it hasn't been sold in America. Also, the lack of official hompage does concern me a bit...

I think they say it delivers an above average, though not superb, power conversion rate, it runs a bit warmer than average, but it is very quiet. It ends with a thumbs up, but appenetly not an unconditional one. I'm sorry, but my German isn't that good. If anyone that know German could tell me the gist of that review it would be helpful.

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2004-12-23 01:49am

McNum wrote:I looked up some more about the EPoX brand. Main homepage is www.epox.com but the international one has a .tw ending. I think that might be Taiwan. So, the "bad capacitor" theory gains a little. If that's the problem then a motherboard exchange should solve the problem. If not, then I need to find the real offender.

Most all (there may be an exception, but I don't know of any) motherboard manufacturers are Taiwanese. ASUS, MSI, Epox, ECS, Biostar, they're all from Taiwan.

As for the power supply, the general motto is to just avoid any PSU that's not from a widely-recognized name. I've never heard of COBA, so I have no idea how good they are... and it looks like neither do most people. Cheap thing would be to simply get a PSU from a local computer store out of the brands that Phong listed and pop that in; keep the old one as a reserve, and you can test it for clean power whenever you feel like it. Get a surge protector while you're at it, because noise on the power lines can also trash a computer.

Then you can see how your computer runs. If there's no more problems, you've isolated it. If not, maybe you got a motherboard with a bad capacitor.

Glocksman · Post by **Glocksman** » 2004-12-23 02:50am

Crayz9000 wrote:
McNum wrote:I looked up some more about the EPoX brand. Main homepage is www.epox.com but the international one has a .tw ending. I think that might be Taiwan. So, the "bad capacitor" theory gains a little. If that's the problem then a motherboard exchange should solve the problem. If not, then I need to find the real offender.
Most all (there may be an exception, but I don't know of any) motherboard manufacturers are Taiwanese. ASUS, MSI, Epox, ECS, Biostar, they're all from Taiwan.

As for the power supply, the general motto is to just avoid any PSU that's not from a widely-recognized name. I've never heard of COBA, so I have no idea how good they are... and it looks like neither do most people. Cheap thing would be to simply get a PSU from a local computer store out of the brands that Phong listed and pop that in; keep the old one as a reserve, and you can test it for clean power whenever you feel like it. Get a surge protector while you're at it, because noise on the power lines can also trash a computer.

Then you can see how your computer runs. If there's no more problems, you've isolated it. If not, maybe you got a motherboard with a bad capacitor.

They arent widely available in the US under their own name, but Heroichi made the PP line of PSU's for Antec and they were damned good units.

Heroichi PSU's

They may be easier to find overseas than here in the US.

Number One Rule of Power Supplies is don't use anything by Deer.

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2004-12-23 12:29pm

Heroichi goes by HEC in the states, and I sell a shitload of their PSUs at work. Great gear, basically Antec at 3/4 the price. NEVER get their PowerOP series though. They're great power supplies, but if you like neat case wiring, 100-percent shielded cabling is an ironclad bitch.

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2004-12-24 12:40am

Crayz9000 wrote:
Hook up a multimeter (if you don't know how to check for a bad power supply, you should get a local electronics geek to do it for you) and check to make sure that the voltages it's producing aren't flucuating too much. If they aren't, you can get popped capacitors and other such annoyances. A better way would be to hook it up to an oscilloscope and make sure the output is smooth, but most people don't have oscilloscopes handy.

And make sure that if you have someone else test the power supply, that they load it down somehow. Hooking up a fan or two will be sufficient.

Tribun · Post by **Tribun** » 2004-12-25 08:37pm

So either a cheap power supply, or problems with heat.
Other things are hardly resposible for such a defect.

McNum · Post by **McNum** » 2004-12-29 05:41pm

The prblem seems to be over now. I got the motherboard to the store where I bought it and their technicians very quickly recognized this one.... Maybe a little too quickly. It was, thankfully, "only" a motherboard problem. Seems like it actually WAS the bad capacitor problem.

Anyway a new motherboard and a new CPU cooler was all that it needed to be back online. I want a surge protector, but I can't use one here. It needs an electrical outlet wiith a ground wire. Our installations are too old, so we don't have that.

Thanks for all your advice, though. You most likely saved me a lot of money, anyway and now I know the name of every last component in my machine, which can't be a bad thing.

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2004-12-31 03:43am

McNum wrote:I want a surge protector, but I can't use one here. It needs an electrical outlet wiith a ground wire. Our installations are too old, so we don't have that.

Actually, you can get adapters at just about any hardware store relatively easily. The hot and neutral prongs go through normally while the "ground" prong is wired to a loop that touches the center screw on the outlet cover.

However, I would seriously consider not getting a surge protector and going to a full UPS (uninterruptable power supply, aka "battery backup"). Most of them usually have rather large warranties covering anything connected to them for a given period of time. (APC units have lifetime warranties. Mine has a "$25,000 lifetime warranty" with it, which covers pretty much anything other than intentional damage.) A good one will run you about $70 or so, but you'll be suprised how often they can save your ass.

StarDestroyer.Net BBS

My motherboard seems to be dying.

My motherboard seems to be dying.

Re: My motherboard seems to be dying.