Re: [chat] GENERAL INFO: An experiment in motherboard upgrades - GA-7IXE4 to Asus A7V133 (w. Promise Raid)

[Catie Flick <liedra@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 28 Oct, Gnuthad wrote:
> On 28 Oct 2001,, Catie Flick <liedra@xxxxxxxxxx> said:
> 
> 
>> Anyway, I was upgrading my gigabyte GA-7IXE4 to an Asus A7V133 with an
>> extra set of ide controllers (and a promise raid chip). Firstly, when
>> everything was screwed in, I booted up, and noticed the RAM was running
>> at the PC-100 speed. Fine, I noted, pulling out the 64M stick, I'll buy
>> some more. Back with 512M more RAM, I ended up frying my other 128M
>> stick by, er, putting it in backwards. It's now a nice keyring. Don't
>> try putting RAM in in the dark of under the desk ;)
> 
> How did you even manage to get the memory into the slot? Last time I 
> checked, DIMMs and DDR were both keyed and can only be inserted one 
> way without physically brweaking either the slot or the stick.

Well, it was dark, you see, so I pushed it in as hard as I could and
thought the little catches were in properly... but they weren't. One
powerup and slight burning smell... ooh, what's that? hmm, better power
off... put hand in to feel RAM... shit, it burned me! Run to cold water
tap, etc.

There's a lovely black connector now on th stick ;)

> 
>> When it all booted up, it looked fine, except that odd things were
>> segfaulting on bootup. Things like apmd, gpm, sendmail, other random
>> things (but the same things each time I booted). I checked the RAM and I
>> checked it again, a thorough memtest found no errors. It was starting to
>> bug me that kernel compiles (considered a fairly good exercise of a
>> machine's stability) would segfault; it was fairly obvious that this was
>> not a stable, or happy, machine.
> 
> Sounds like a power problem, got a good quality 300W supply or only a 
> cheapie 250W?

Read on, friend!


> 
>> Someone mentioned to me that it could be a power problem, so I unplugged
>> everything except for the mobo and the hdd, and we tried again. Still no
>> joy. Eventually, I thought, well, if I'm going to be powering 5 IDE
>> devices (the reason I got this one in the first place), I'll need a
>> chunkier power supply *anyway*, so I went out and bought a 300W PSU, put
>> it in and whammo! no more segfaults!
> 
> Yup, that's rather typical. For any recent motherboard, 250W just 
> won't cut it any more. 300W should be considered the bare minimum.

It's amazing, then, that 250W PSUs are still the default wattage. I had
to ask in three different shops before I found one with a 300W PSU (at
technocity). I was surprised.

> 
>> So the moral of the story is: even if you unplug all your powerhungry
>> devices the 250W PSU you have might not be enough for the motherboard.
>> Oh, and don't do stupid things with RAM. 
> 
> Oh, and don't do stupid things with hard drive power connectors, they 
> are quite easy to break off if you try inserting the plug without 
> pushing it directly towards the hard drive and without holding the 
> socket, and it's NOT covered by warranty.
> 

Fortunately I've managed to avoid that one :)

Catie

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