Help diagnosing New Comp Problem

[Corwyn]

I just put together a new athlon xp system. Xp1900, epox 8KHA+, Geforce 3 Ti500, 512 Mushkin DDR.

After putting the system together I immediately smelled smoke. Shut doown. It appeared to be coming from the Chipset fan. I noticed the fan power wire was tucked almost underneath it. I moved the wire and tried again. No smoke, but would not boot. The Motherboard debug board read FF (boot Attempt Int19h). Removed everything but powersupply,vid card,CPU/heat sink (a master cooler) and memory. Tried again , still FF. Came back a little later after reading a post about the memory being hard to seat, removed the board, made sure the memory was in there, and reinstalled the board. Now when I turn it on the error code pops up as C1 (detect memory . auto detection of DRAM, auto detection of L2).

Unfortunately my other computer is to old to use it to test the pieces indivdually (except for vid card, thats been verified ok). So I was wondering what you guys thought. The smoke worries me, I am afraid either the MB or the Proc got fried. What does a dead CPU look like. I see no burn marks anywhere (probably just smoke from wire). I notice that the CPU has small circular marks in a grid formation that can be seen when held up to light on the Made in Malaysia side. Is this normal (exscuse my ignorance).

Anyway, any help , thoughts or criticisms greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
John

 

[ojai00]

That part about the smoke scares me too. I hope it's not a burnt out CPU, but that is a high possibility. I would try to find a system to test the RAM and the CPU on to see if that's the problem. Hope you get your problem fixed. BTW...welcome to the forums. 😉

 

[Corwyn]

Thanks for the welcome. I am still trying to figure out whats wrong. I don't want to remove the chipset fan yet, in case I do an RMA on the part. I need to take a close look at the fan wire, it doesn't look melted, so I'm not sure what was burning when I first turned it on. The thermal paste on the cpu never melted so I "assume" that at least the chip didn't die from overheating. Also no burn marks on the cpu make me wonder if thats the problem or not. Thanks again for the reply!

John