After four years of trusty operation, my K7S5A finally went up in smoke. Here I was watching a nice episode of Star Trek when all of a sudden the picture froze. I thought it was my wireless keyboard running out of juice and somehow hitting random keys and pausing the picture. Screwed around with the keyboard for a bit and no luck. Finally got up and went to take a look at the computer itself and I start smelling something funny. Went around to the back and saw smoke coming out of the PSU!!! Unplug everything and take apart PSU thinking it was fried (I was ready to throw curses at Zalman). Don't see anything burnt inside PSU and start scratching my head. Check the CPU to see if it fried, but can't find burn marks. Start sniffing around to see if I could locate the burnt smell, and narrowed it down to CPU fan. Plugged in CPU fan and it starts spinning no problem. Now I'm really lost. I clearly saw smoke. Finally, out of sheer luck, I glance at the mosfets on the mobo, and one of them is cracked. I move further down and find another mosfet that's ashed over. Holy crap. And some of the caps look like they're about to explode. Good thing I unplugged everything when I did. Sucks because now I have to actually go to the computer to turn it on, instead of using the handy keyboard power-on feature of the K7S5A, which is great for an HTPC application. The replacement PCCHIPS M811LU doesn't have keyboard power-on. Oh well, it was $30.
Burned
Cliff's notes:
1) K7S5a went up in smoke
Burned
Cliff's notes:
1) K7S5a went up in smoke
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