Christ that soldering is apalling! No I don't I have a Gigabyte board.
I agree, I would never perform such "modifications" but it does highlight
the problem well. What is the Gigabyte model number for your board?
Hmm sounds like Tyan screwed up a bit there. Drawing far too much
current.
You're correct. They are now providing no-quibbles RMAs on such affected
boards and have developed a power adapter cable to help solve the problem
whilst still using a 20 pin ATX connector on the board.
Everything is/was fine until I plugged in that blasted modem. Now how
could that overload a 550 watt(!) supply? And burn out something on the
board inbetween too, as it stopped 64bit slots working and reduced speed of
32 bit ones.
Some PSUs aren't very good at coping with overloads. If there was a defect
with the mobo its possible that the gold strips on the card were misaligned
with (some of) the connectors in the PCI slot or there may have been some
sort of conductive rubbish in the slot before the card went in.
Then the raid card (a very cheap one but it says 33/66MHz) will cause the
PC to just not bleep at startup - blank screen.
A clissic sign of a power related problem is failure to POST - if the PSU is
struggling to supply the board, the last thing it needs is additional cards.
Am I right in thinking that if a card has TWO cutouts in the PCI
connector, it should work in a 64bit slot? According to the RAID card
manual, it only does 32bit, but it WILL do 66MHz (which presumably requires
use of a 64bit slot as the 32bit ones only do 33MHz?)
My S2460 only has 33 MHz PCI slots throughout (both 32 and 64 bit) and I'm
not up to speed with 66 MHz slots - I still think you have (at least) a PSU
related problem there though (it may have taken out bits of the mobo or
other hardware too). Do you have another known good PSU you can try with the
board? BTW PSU failure is one of the most common faults that afflicts PC
hardware. In my experience as a computer tech at a school, over a period of
15 months we had about 5 go pop, most complete with sparks out the back and
lots of smoke - not to mention the scared students and staff. This compares
with a similar number of HDDs failing over the same period.
RAID.
How did you get the PSU to be silent? Does it still have full airflow as
orignally designed - if not, consider this as the prime cause. Very few PSUs
of that wattage are "silent" (or even genuinely quiet for that matter -
despite claims by makers such as "whisper quiet" etc) and modifying them by
replacing the fans with slower, quieter ones, reduces their lifespan
significantly.
<snip>
Paul
