Came home last night and noticed that my apartment smelled like
burning plastic. Turns out that unsavory odor was emanating from my
PC, which I'd left on that day and which was now completely locked up
with a blank screen.

Cracked it open and saw that the power connectors to the motherboard
were charred - specifically, the two left wires (red & orange) and the
three right wires (all red). God knows if any of my components
survived, but my question right now is:

Any idea what caused this?

In article < >,
Aaron Erimez <> wrote:

Haven't seen this on my P6DGH's, but did see this on a SM Pentium Pro
board caused by different metals on the power supply contacts and the
motherboard contacts - get corrosion, eventual failure. In my case
removing the power supply connector on the MB and soldering in a
replacement (extensions with AT power connectors are easily available,
think that this is also true for ATX) and the board came up.

The problem is electrolytic corrosion caused by moisture between two
dissimilar metals. I was told some time ago that SM made power cable
externders with gold contacts on one end and tin on the other, but
I've never enquired.

Mike Squires
--

Mike Squires (mikes at cs.indiana.edu) 317 233 9456 (w) 812 333 6564 (h)
mikes at siralan.org 546 N Park Ridge Rd., Bloomington, IN 47408

You were absolutely right, Mike! I repared the connectors from the
power supply and got the motherboard connector from an old AT board.
After a little soldering work, everything seems to work fine! I was
really worried that the system was a total loss, and I can hardly
believe that after all that damage and re-work everything is fine. So
thanks again!

Aaron

Follow-up: Now that everything is reassembled, it seems that the CPU
temps are higher than they were before. According to the BIOS, the
idle CPU temps are about 50 degrees C. Is this an issue?

In article <> ,
Aaron Erimez <> wrote:
>Follow-up: Now that everything is reassembled, it seems that the CPU
>temps are higher than they were before. According to the BIOS, the
>idle CPU temps are about 50 degrees C. Is this an issue?

Rather funny - my daughter's P6DGH died this weekend with the same
problem.

Whether or not CPU temps are currently too high by the manufacturer's
spec is the main issue here. If you made no other changes then I'd
wonder if the new power connectors had enough lower resistance so
that CPU power draw was that much higher, but it's just a guess.

MLS
--

Mike Squires (mikes at cs.indiana.edu) 317 233 9456 (w) 812 333 6564 (h)
mikes at siralan.org 546 N Park Ridge Rd., Bloomington, IN 47408