Any idea what would cause this? *INTERESTING*

[tweakr]

hey

Just finished picking bits of molten plastic off the inside of my case following what looks like a voltage regulator exploding on my Abit ZM6 motherboard. This also appears to have killed my V3-2000, and I'm hoping it hasn't killed my celeryII 533. Halfway through a boot, I heard a loud pop, and the machine just stopped - went dead. Now, the PS still works, and as far as I can tell every component apart from the ones above still works too (not sure about the CPU, since my other machine is a K6-2 605, and I can;t test the celery in that). The board's out of warranty now, so I've had to splash out on a new one (BX-133 RAID ), but I'd still like to know what would've caused this...

cheers
tweakr

 

[Fardringle]

It could have been simply a bad voltage regulator, but it also could have been caused by a spike in voltage from your power supply, in which case it is possible that it will happen again on a new motherboard. I'm not sure how you would go about testing this, but those are the only two possibilities I can think of.

 

[tweakr]

Hi

Thanks for the reply. I doubt it was a faulty voltage regulator, since I have had this MB for almost 2 years now (one of the lucky later models which supports the Celeron2). Also, the powersupply is a 330w Enermax, that has been perfectly functional for the last 2 months. The spontaneous nature of the problem really suprised me, as I can think of nothing that would cause a voltage regulator to blow like that...Still, I'm gonna check the grounding of the board b4 i install the new one (when it eventually arrives....), as there are no other things I can think of that would cause this...

cheers
tweakr