- Apr 27, 2000
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Apparently I just killed an old k9a2 platinum I was playing with on an open-air test bench (read: a slat of wood). Had it hooked up to a Seasonic X-series 1250w, 2 R9 290s, a Phenom 9750 and 8 Gb of DDR2-800. I had all the relevant power connectors plugged in (molex for PCIe, 4-pin for CPU, 24-pin for everything else).
Everything worked fine to start except that I couldn't get the USB livecd I plugged in there to boot (still trying to sort out that one, but it may be that I created it on a UEFI system . . . it was meant to be an mbr drive for legacy systems, though. Used Rufus). One of the two cards was getting toasty, so I decided to move a card from PCIe slot 1 to 2. That blocked the power switch, so I then moved it to PCIe slot 3. Installing the card in slot 3 sort of squished the cable leading to the USB/Firewire backplate extension I had plugged in to accommodate extra USB devices. After that, the system refused to boot despite my best efforts to bring it around (reseated power cables, reseated RAM, reseated/swapped video cards). It still gets power according to the power LED, but it won't do anything or even spin up the fans.
I was making sure to switch the PSU off and unplug it before moving around any hardware, and I made sure to make routine body contact with the PSU to establish a common ground plane (avoid static).
So, I'm wondering: what did I do that likely killed the board? Was it compressing that USB header cable? Touching the PSU to maintain a ground plane? Moving the card around (with power off) while the PCIe power connectors were still plugged into the card?
Or maybe it's just old and died of "natural causes".
Both 290s are fine, so it's no great loss. I'm just going to have to relegate the k9a2 to the dustbin and move on.
Everything worked fine to start except that I couldn't get the USB livecd I plugged in there to boot (still trying to sort out that one, but it may be that I created it on a UEFI system . . . it was meant to be an mbr drive for legacy systems, though. Used Rufus). One of the two cards was getting toasty, so I decided to move a card from PCIe slot 1 to 2. That blocked the power switch, so I then moved it to PCIe slot 3. Installing the card in slot 3 sort of squished the cable leading to the USB/Firewire backplate extension I had plugged in to accommodate extra USB devices. After that, the system refused to boot despite my best efforts to bring it around (reseated power cables, reseated RAM, reseated/swapped video cards). It still gets power according to the power LED, but it won't do anything or even spin up the fans.
I was making sure to switch the PSU off and unplug it before moving around any hardware, and I made sure to make routine body contact with the PSU to establish a common ground plane (avoid static).
So, I'm wondering: what did I do that likely killed the board? Was it compressing that USB header cable? Touching the PSU to maintain a ground plane? Moving the card around (with power off) while the PCIe power connectors were still plugged into the card?
Or maybe it's just old and died of "natural causes".
Both 290s are fine, so it's no great loss. I'm just going to have to relegate the k9a2 to the dustbin and move on.
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