I think I might have just let the smoke out of my home computer. I'm typing this on my wife's laptop.

If anyone can help me with the following information, it might allow me to narrow down the fault:

If an ATX power supply were to go faulty, how would I check the voltage on the pins to see if that were true?

Specifically, if I had a volt meter, which pin would I connect the ground wire to, and then how much voltage would I expect to read on the other pins? And how do I get it to turn on if it's not plugged into the motherboard (which pins do I jumper)?

I have narrowed the fault down to the CPU, the motherboard, or the power supply. Since the PC's failure was preceded by the faint odor of smoke escaping from the smoke-storage devices within the PC, and the motherboard and CPU components didn't feel excessively hot, and since the power supply is a cheap-ass Taiwanese number without a warranty, I'm seriously suspecting the power supply.

The motherboard gets enough juice to start all the fans and try and spin up the drives. But it never fires up the video card. And I know it's not the video card since I swapped that. Since the BIOS controls the power-switch behavior, and the switch does turn the PC on (just not off again), I get the feeling that some components are getting enough voltage while others aren't.

So, what pins do I test and how? Or any other advice?

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Tony Fabris

tony this sit has the pin outs and all the info you need http://www.compute-aid.com/atxspec.html

andrew butler
sn 08000176 6G amber

Except if it is a Dell PC, where the connectors will look like ATX plugs, but be wired differently...

__
Unit serial number 47 (was 330 in the queue)...

or you can try http://www.hardwarebook.net/ which has just about every cable or connector you could think of on it!!

(list 6284, Mk1 S/N 00299 4GB blue [for sale]. Mk2 S/N 080000094 6GB blue)

Or any other advice?

Ditch it and buy an Enermax PSU -- I've had far too many problems with power supplies -- see here and here -- to bother faffing around with them.



Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

To test the motherboard connector, just take the black lead from multimeter and put it in any black connection. Then take the other lead and put it in any yellow(+12v) connection. A good voltage is between 11 and 13 volts, anything outside that and you need a new power supply. Be sure to check all the connections. There could be surges that are so fast you can't see them, it would be a good idea to buy a new ps to keep around anyway. http://www.quietpc.com

Sean

Edited by Terminator on 13/08/01 04:49 PM.

Thanks, that's exactly the diagram I was looking for!

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Tony Fabris

Hmmm.

Okay, I bought a new power supply, before I even tested the existing one. My reasoning: Even if the problem was with the motherboard or the CPU, I would never trust the existing power supply, thinking that it might have caused the other components to fail. So I was going to have to spend money on the power supply no matter where the fault was.

The new power supply did not allow the motherboard to boot. Same symptoms.

I finally took the board out of the case and had a close look. Two large capacitors on the motherboard, near the CPU, appear to have "swollen" tops. I don't think they're supposed to be that way. I think that's what happened: those caps blew.

Anyone have any experience with this sort of thing? Would replacing those caps fix anything?

The motherboard, by the way, is this one. If you look at this picture...

...the capacitors that blew are the pair located just below and to the right of the purple LPT1 connector.

Update: Here is a bigger picture of the board. The caps that blew are to the right of the purple LPT1 connector in this photo.

___________
Tony Fabris

You can certainly try that, but I suspect that your problems may be deeper than this. The last few PSU problems I had resulted in fried chips -- both CPU and chipsets. The tops of the packages got hot enough to boil water, but once they'd cooled down there was no visible damage. One other failure resulted in a blown track on about layer 3 of a >7 layer board.

IMHO, it's cheaper to just get over it and buy yourself a shiny new Asus A7V-E, and a Duron/Athlon.

Disclaimer: I'm known as A7V-man in the office, after buying two A7Vs and two Athlon 900's within 3 weeks of eachother. I'd recommend them to anyone, however.


Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

Uhhh, yeah. What Roger said.

A new motherboard isn't really all that expensive ($100--$150) and by the time you factor in the amount of time and expense it will take you to find and purchase the replacement parts, install them, then do it all over again when they blow up again because you fixed only the symptoms and not the root cause of the problem....

I would never even consider trying to repair a blown motherboard -- there are so many thousands of things that could be wrong that without very sophisticated test equipment, you'll never figure it out.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

A new motherboard isn't really all that expensive ($100--$150)

I just got this mobo (used) from a co-worker for $150.00. That included the mobo, the 600mhz CPU, 128mb of RAM, and a PCI ethernet adapter. So I'd like to try to repair the one I've got first.

I would never even consider trying to repair a blown motherboard

Well, replacing the two capacitors seems easy enough, and for three bucks and a little bit of my time, seems worth a try. I might be able to do it tomorrow sometime, I'll let you know how it goes.

___________
Tony Fabris

Thanks for mentioning the Enermax. The PSU in my main desktop (an Enlight case/PSU) smoked Tuesday and I picked up an Enermax 350. Much quieter and lots of 3-ping connectors.

Coincidentally, my eye was caught by a Lian Le PC-60 aluminum case. At first the price (~$170 USD) started to give me chest pains, but when I popped the hood I had to get it. 4x5.25 bays and EIGHT x 3.5 in a case not much bigger than the Enlight. I was challenged to hook up 4 IDE drives to an Arco IDE RAID controller in the Enlight, but in the PC-60, no sweat. Now all the hard drives sit on edge in that lower 5-slot rack (right behind a pair of fans) leaving all the front accessible 5.25 slots free for CD/CDR/DVD -- this will allow me to add a removable IDE HD for backup purposes. Also, even with *5* fans (2 in the PSU), this case/fan combo is noticable quieter than the Enlight. No idea of the aluminum construction really dows anything to improve cooling, but it looks neat.

Jim

Coincidentally, my eye was caught by a Lian Le PC-60 aluminum case. At first the price (~$170 USD) started to give me chest pains, but when I popped the hood I had to get it. 4x5.25 bays and EIGHT x 3.5 in a case not much bigger than the Enlight.

I've been looking at their cases lately really thinking about getting one. Right now my machine is sitting in a Gateway case I am borrowing, since I used my black case for an entertainment system. The Gateway case is huge, and has very little in the way of expansion. The other problem is that it didn't have an ATX knockout, so my onboard LAN port is covered. Well, I did get $650 I wasn't expecting today, so maybe I'll finally order one instead of pondering it over and over.

If anyone is interested in an aliminum case, a nice review of a few are here.

Hi.

Jim wrote:
Lian Le PC-60 aluminum case [...] 4x5.25 bays and EIGHT x 3.5 in a case
Drakino wrote:
a nice review of a few are here.

Now you've got me confused. Are there eight (8) 3.5" bays, or six (6) like the review says? From the pics on the review, I guess the review is right, but there might be two additional bays hidden from view (either at the top or next to the 3 internal bays that are visible).
Nice case anyway. Certainly would like that one.

cu,
sven


proud MkII owner (12GB blue/green/smoked, was #080000113 is #090001010)

Sven,

I thinks some of the reviews may have been of an earlier revision. The PC-60 I got has (4) 5.25" slots on top, (3) 3.5" slots that are front-accessible (not like some cases that hide 1 of the 3) and it has an internal rack with space for 5 3.5" drives. I think the earlier revision (or some of the other models) had/have a smaller internal rack. This PC-60 also has 4 USB ports on the lower edge of the front panel that will connect to MBs with USB headers.

I just checked the Lian Li web site and even that doesn't show the newer PC-60. It looks like the one they show has the internal drives mounted "flat" -- they obviously figured out that they could fit more if they put them on edge. Not sure I'll ever put 5 in there, more like 4. A neat touch is that the pair of fans in front of this internal drive rack has a 3-speed adjustment switch.

Did you ever get those Oreos? Perhaps there are some on eBay.

Jim

It looks like the one they show has the internal drives mounted "flat" -- they obviously figured out that they could fit more if they put them on edge.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I think I remember reading somewhere that hard drives are happy being mounted flat, or at a 90 degree angle ("on edge") but not anything in between. However, that doesn't seem reasonable when you consider thrust and side loadings on the spindle drive bearings.

Is it considered acceptable to mount hard drives on edge?

tanstaafl.


"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

"Is it considered acceptable to mount hard drives on edge?" tanstaafl

I researched this extensively on the Psychic Friends Network. The insight I achieved is that it *is* OK to mount drives at 90 degrees with the following conditions. Clockwise-rotating drives distributed in the Northern Hemisphere should be turned on their right side (viewed facing IDE connector) so that static charge buildup from rotation will counteract gravitational spindle pressure. In similar fashion, the counterclockwise drives typically sourced in the Southern Hemisphere should be turned up on their left edge.

Oddly, tech specs I found for Maxtor high-speed SCSI drives omit these vital details. They say they don't care!

Jim

Um, sorry, but that sounds like absolute rubbish to me!!!

(list 6284, Mk1 S/N 00299 4GB blue [for sale]. Mk2 S/N 080000094 6GB blue)

That's because he was joking.

___________
Tony Fabris

He must have been joking, the part about Maxtor's tech specs is total Whoooie!

gbeer: "He must have been joking, the part about Maxtor's tech specs is total Whoooie!"

Laugh while you can, monkeyboy.

From www.maxtor.com... (Reference # 000927-000000)
"The environment (rack, cabinet, or drawer) for the hard disk drive must provide cooling of the electronics and head/ disk assembly (HDA). Although the hard drive can be mounted in any orientation, when you install the drive, be sure to direct airflow that creates the least amount of airflow resistance, while providing airflow to the electronics and HDA. .."

See Also: http://www.fujitsu-europe.com/home/product.asp?PID=100&INFO=cfg

See Also: From: http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/prodspec/dtla_spw.pdf "7.7.5 Drive mounting The drive will operate in all axes (6 directions). Performance and error rate will stay within specification limits if the drive is operated in the other orientations from which it was formatted."

These are not all consistent (Fujitsu does seem to favor my 90 degree Coriolis mounting), but the bottom line would seem to be that edge-wise mounting is OK and (for many) that mounting angle may be irrelevant. I am heartened to see this, if only for the many times that I have seen people take their desktop PC cases and turn them into ersatz mini-towers (I have had many bad spindle dreams!).

OK, OK, so I have an insurmountable aversion to smileys/emoticons. I'll try to do better ;-(

Jim

Laugh while you can, monkeyboy.

No matter where you go, there you are.

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BB