Kate said while whinging about his dead motherboard
>Anyway, I was fitting the heatsinks, and it turns out that Socket370 is a
>tad bigger than Intels's old Pentiums. But if you ask for a "Celeron"
>heatsink, you get a pentium one. The clip just needs to be streched a
>little. And the BP6 has very little room around the CPU, for a big heatsink
>- it's a crowded board. I wasn't putting enough force into pushing the ckip
>down, and it slipped out, and touched the board itself. I saw a little
>spark, and thought "That's odd - it's powered off".
>Turns out that ATX cases provide power to the motherboards, even when they
>are powered off, to allow for boards with "wakeup-on-dial" functionality.
>So, though it's completely silent, your ATX board has 12v going around the
>edge. One touch of metal off that, and "sayonara motherboard". I no longer
>will leave the power cable in when doing hardware stuff on a machine.
Jeez - isn't life a bitch. I would strongly recommend leaving a power cable in
a box for grounding purposes, but if you're inclined to be as clumsy as Kate :-)
disconnect the ATX power plug from the motherboard before working on it (and maybe
you should tape it up away from the board too :-)
Kindest regards,
Niall O Broin
UNIX Network Administrator nobroin at esoc.esa.de
Ground Systems Engineering Department Ph./Fax +49 6151 90 3619/2179
European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany
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