PC was working fine until upgrade and now, fried mobo, videocard, and CPU.

[HKSturboKID]

Well I finally got my Fedora up and running with samba on my slow pc, so I decided to upgrade to a faster pc. Was using a duron 750 w/ an old Asus motherboard and a ATi 16 mb video card. Bought a new motherboard from newegg with nf2 chipset put everything in and power it up, no sound, no video and no beeps at all, reseat everything and make sure its snug and still no go. So I took the motherboard out, sit on top of the box(paper) plug the processor in, memory, videocard, and the monitor and next thing I know the video card start SMOKING. yes smoking... So I quickly turn the power off. From the burnt mark on the video card, the card is pretty shot, tested on another pc and confirm it. As for the CPU, I took it back out and put it back to my old motherboard and its dead as well. Does anyone know how do I test to see for sure if the CPU is really dead?

Thanks.

 

[LemonHerbWRX]

I think you pretty much tested it there. Now see, that is what you get for using Linux . Personally I am tring to get more proficiant with it, but it took me half a week to get a resoloution problem fixed in mandrake, but I am still plugging away. Sounds like everything got pretty well fried, which sucks because it shouldn't have happened. I have turned on PCs sitting on cardboard boxes several times and not fried anything. My guess is you may have killed it all. So what is the next step?

Warrenty. You become the stupid user. Call up each manufaturer and get their tech support department. Let them walk you through every troublshooting step they can manage with you and none of it will work. The line you want to practice the most is "I don't know what happened, I just turned it on and it didn't work." I wouldn't mention smoke or burning.

As long as everything is still under warrenty you should be fine, though it sounds like most of it isn't. I am not sure what processor warranty times are anymore, and I think video cards are about a year. But you can probably get your motherboard and RAM replaced. Most companies are really good at RMA, they don't lose a lot of money on the deal because the manufacutreing costs of product is low, most of what you pay is to recoup R&D costs I imagine. For a company, it is better to RMA and build a good customer who believes in the company then to deny them

 

[mechBgon]

From the vintage of your card, my guess is that it was not built for a modern 0.8V/1.5V AGP slot. As it says in the manual of virtually every mobo these days, you must not use old 3.3V cards. Sorry to hear of your situation there. Try a Geforce2-generation or later card if you can get your hands on one. Many TNT2-generation cards were 1.5V cards as well.

 

[HKSturboKID]

Yup you guys are right. The hardware that I am using are at least 2 years or older. There goes the warranty. I ordered replacement/comparable parts already. Overall cost to replace is about $100. I guess I'll becareful next time. Thanks for the advice.

 

[LemonHerbWRX]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
From the vintage of your card, my guess is that it was not built for a modern 0.8V/1.5V AGP slot. As it says in the manual of virtually every mobo these days, you must not use old 3.3V cards. Sorry to hear of your situation there. Try a Geforce2-generation or later card if you can get your hands on one. Many TNT2-generation cards were 1.5V cards as well.

Good call on that. I had never even thought of that as the reason why.