Can a PS kill a MB?

madoka

Diamond Member
Jun 22, 2004
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I have a Soyo SY-P4I865PE Plus DRAGON 2 V1.0 865PE Chipset motherboard:

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-139-144&depa=0

I recently did a bios upgrade. Afterwards the motherboard would not recognize any drives. I found that if you cleared the CMOS, it would boot up again. However, if you shut it down and try to restart, it will not recognize the drives again thus necessitating another clearing of the CMOS. I tried replacing the onboard battery with no luck.

I exchanged the board with Soyo, who were pretty nice about it. They gave me a brand new board with the new bios and the tech told me that I should look at my power supply as the voltages may have been slowly killing the board. (I have a Antec Sonata with the 380 watt PS.)

Took the new board home and it started acting exactly as the old board did. I swapped PS to a brand new Antec NeoPower 480 with the same results.

Any idea why this may be happening?
 

akugami

Diamond Member
Feb 14, 2005
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A failing PSU or a cheap one that doesn't fully live up to spec can kill a motherboard among other components.
 

madoka

Diamond Member
Jun 22, 2004
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Originally posted by: akugami
A failing PSU or a cheap one that doesn't fully live up to spec can kill a motherboard among other components.

Yeah, that's why I've stuck to name brands like Antec. But can a failing PS kill a motherboard in a few hours?
 

madoka

Diamond Member
Jun 22, 2004
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Tried using different memory (Kingston) and different configurations but the same problem exists.

Checked the PS readings in the bios and found that they are less than .1 off at any given time.

Any other suggestions?
 

crazyeddie

Senior member
Dec 23, 2004
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Just some possibilities:

1) 2nd motherboard is defective like the 1st one
2) The new BIOS has issues
3) Bad hard drive cable
4) Line power issues are causing problems and you need a line-interactive uninterruptable power supply (Tripp Lite, APC, etc)

After that, I'm not sure what I'd try next...