Smoking P4

[Oxydious]

Hi there,

I'm pretty desperate right now. I've had the worst happen to me for the first time. My Pentium 4 Northwood 1.6A which has been quietly running at 2.7Ghz@1.7V for 6 months just smoked, and I have no idea where to start to find the cause.

All was fine until I replaced my 512MB of Samsung DDR333 by a stick of 512MB of Samsung DDR400. My previous stick reaching over DDR440 in overclocked speed, I was disappointed to see the new one would just make my Abit IT7 beep and refuse to go much higher than DDR410, even with the voltage at 2.8V from 2.5V. (My CPU was at 1.7V from 1.5 all the time)

When I started booting with the DDR400@420, my motherboard emitted a long beep, after which I shutdown the system. I swapped the memory for my miracle DDR333 and just restarted the system, hoping it would start at DDR420 as was set-up in my BIOS. However, my motherboard emitted another higher-pitched long beep and I could smell smoke, after which I saw it coming from the memory/CPU area. I shut down the computer and it still smells worst in the whole room than after a 60 feet tire burnout with my car, damn...

I didn't remove the heatsink to check the CPU yet because I was in a hurry to leave after dinner. I am obviously not next to my computer now... (btw, that heatsink is a Thermalright AX-478, one of the best which kept my CPU below 55 Celcius degrees so I'm puzzled, really...)
What do you guys think could have caused it? Did this happen to any of you?

 

[maxSe]

If you didn't touch the processor in any way, it could be your memory that's fried... May be you didn't insert it all the way in? Check to see if your memory has any burn marks. Put the other memory back in and boot up at normal speed (16x100), no overclocking. (hold down the "insert" key before your power it on). If you still get no boot, then I'll check out the processor. It could be dreaded SNDS... 1.7v is quite high for northwoods... good luck.

 

[Oxydious]

How could the memory fry if it wasn't completely inserted? I actually had much more difficulty than usual to insert it. It seemed well inserted though, I was able to raise both clips over it. As for the voltage, my motherboard let me go up to 1.85V and I've been running at 1.7 for 6 months with no crash whatsoever. I don't think this was extreme. It was actually downclocked (more like down-overclocked ) to about 2.6Ghz when something fried.

The memory stick looked fine, don't know what I should look for if it really burned.

Now when I start my computer, there's no beep and nothing at all, and my Abit IT7 diagnostic LED goes straight to FF.
Could it be something on my board as well?
I'm a bit scared at trying parts from a friend's P4 to find the exact culprit, don't wanna fry anything else!

 

[Jeff7181]

Have you checked the power supply?

 

[maxSe]

If I remember correctly, Abit's "FF" means normal boot... I would pull everything out: memory, vid card, pci cards, and just try to boot barebone - just the memory and vid card.

 

[Oxydious]

I had an Antec TruePower 330W and I just upgraded it yesterday, among other upgrades, to a brand new Antec TrueControl 550W. Everything worked fine. I was actually able to use the system properly and reinstall Windows and everything on a new RAID array, I only started having problems when testing the 3/4 FSB:MEM ratio with my new DDR400 stick. Something fried when I put back the old DDR333.

 

[Oxydious]

Originally posted by: maxSe
If I remember correctly, Abit's "FF" means normal boot... I would pull everything out: memory, vid card, pci cards, and just try to boot barebone - just the memory and vid card.

Yeah FF is normal boot but it usually has to go through a series of codes before reaching FF. Now that's the first and only thing it writes.

 

[Spicedaddy]

Maybe you put the DIMM backwards. That would fry it, and you mentioned you had trouble inserting it...

 

[Oxydious]

If that's the case, should that fry only the RAM or would it have affected anything else?
I'll try my DDR400 as soon as I get back home...

 

[Duvie]

I have seen dimm slots that have fried and often the damage is irreversible and the dimm slot is toast...have you tried the other slots???

 

[Oxydious]

Indeed, there are some very slight dark marks on 2 pins of my DDR333 module.

Trying DDR400 in memory slot 2 and 3 gives error A7 on the LED. It's not listed in the manual (ftp://ftp.abit.com.tw/pub/download/fae/IT7_IT7E_Eng_V100.pdf)

Any idea?

 

[Spicedaddy]

Probably both ram and motherboard are dead.