A weird one tonight that’s left be frustrated, confused and annoyed all at the same time.
I hooked up a spare computer and power supply, booting up an Ubuntu linux distribution so that I could scan through some old hard drives.
Graphics were all wonky and affected (bad artificats). I decided to shut down the computer as I thought it was simply a case of a poor motherboard that was old. I was going to swap it with a spare I had.
In between getting the spare ready, next thing I hear is what sounded like a baloon deflating.
The hell was that?
Next thing I know, I see loads of smoke piling out of the power supply. That’s not good
It also managed to trip my 32A breaker for the ring main, so a severe short or overload somewhere.
Great… just great. Good thing I have a spare power supply
Oh well, I have a spare power supply, so I hooked it up and tested with this motherboard, as I suspected it was a bad PSU
Nope, same problem with graphics. Ah well, guess it is a dodgy board then
I go about hooking up my spare motherboard, then FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF smoke again
Damn it!! Not again.
Now, I could have stripped these down and resoldered a new Cap onto them, but I ain’t risking it.
Not sure what happened, basically best I can work out
–> Shorted motherboard, damaged PSU
–> Bad earth fault in wiring / extension / house
–> Bad cable
I suspected the cable, so went about doing some diagnosis.
Tested the fuse with a multimeter, continuity.
Checked the cables, continuinty with only the wires for each oen
Tested the voltages when plugged in (Earth-Live = 240v, Live-Neutral = 240v, Neutral-Earth = 0V). No leakage here.
I even hooked up my test plug, all correct.
So now I’m stumped, the cables good. Motherboard is the only potential thing I can thing of causing the issue. I used the same cablehowever when hooking up the 2nd motherboard which was out of the cas.
So now I’m thinking it’s a bad cable, or something else in my house has gone funny.
