So my used Asus P5KC motherboard ( P35 chipset, paid $50 used for it ) worked fine for 2 months here, then completely died on me yesterday...it shut itself off for no reason.. when I turned it back on I noticed the cpu fan would not spin at all...the case fans spun but when the cpu fan does not spin very bad sign. I tested the cpu fan in another computer and there was nothing wrong with it... the motherboard was failing to provide any power to the fan and the board will not post at all anymore...I unplugged the power supply and removed the mobo battery for half an hour to clear out all settings and remove cpu overclock, plus jumpered the CLR_CMOS pins to clear the cmos/bios settings multiple times, still did not help, still no post ( boot )...
It is not my 3 year old Antec Earthwatts 650W psu, that is tested and working perfectly...problem is the mobo, nothing else here...
I guess that $50 used Asus mobo was on its last legs when I bought it, the board was 6 years old after all ... damn, was hoping to get a bit more life out of it though...2 months...sigh...I had a mild overclock on the cpu ( from stock 2.67 Ghz to 3.35 Ghz , cpu max temp never exceeded 50C with OCZ Vendetta 2 cooler on it , cpu voltage was managed by Intel Speedstep and most of the time the cpu downclocked to 2.5 Ghz @ 1.1 cpu volts, under full load it was 1.21 volts @ 3.35 Ghz as measured by CoreTemp utility ). So I did not push it that hard and it only ran full tilt during gaming...in retrospect I would not have overclocked the cpu at all if I could have predicted this would happen, but the board was reviewed to be an excellent overclocker, it had nice large copper pipe heatsinks to cool the northbridge and VRMs on the board, it was built to be overclocked ( Intel P35 performance chipset ) so this surprised me. I think the board was just very old and about to die anyways, I just finished it off...Doh!! The overclock may or may not have been a factor here... if anything the overclock would have simply speeded up the inevitable anyways...no more used boards for me...only new...
So in desperation ( no other laptop or computer available to me here right now ) I hauled out an old IBM Pentium 4 box I had laying around but it refused to boot at all too...had raped parts out of it in the past so not surprised...
I just wanted something to be able to surf with and check emails until I can buy another new Gigabyte G41 chipset Socket 775 mobo from CC like I did before ( the last one I bought from there lasted me 1.5 years but I didn't realize the northbridge heatsink overheats on them ( design flaw ) , so next time I will put a small cpu fan on the northbridge so the mobo will last much longer then ). However all G41 chipsets have this design flaw, and it is the only new S775 mobo option left on the market these days... cheap $60 mobos.. you get what you pay for... I cannot afford a new $200 cpu and new $100 mobo right now so will get another cheap G41 board until I can save up enough for new Ivy Bridge cpu and mobo...
So sitting here wondering how to get online, then I remembered that a neighbour had given me his old Pentium 3 667 Mhz cpu with matching old mobo, so I hauled that outta my closet and put the 256 MB PC 133 ram stick in it, plugged in the IBM P4 systems 100 watt power supply into it, added old Radeon AGP vidcard, and a PCI network card ( no onboard video or NIC on this old mobo ) with Maxtor Slimline 40GB 5400rpm drive ( ugh!!! but at least it already had XP loaded on it and I didnt have to sacrifice one of my good 7200rpm drives out of my main box and lose data etc formatting it for Windows) and it booted right up for me!! So I am typing this post on this frankenstein of a system right now, Windows XP of course.. it is actually not too bad considering how old it is, I have no sound ( no onboard audio and no old pci sound card laying around but don't care, this is a very temporary solution until I get a new Socket 775 board from CC for my Q9400 quadcore cpu. ).
Running latest Google Chrome browser and it actually works okay...surfing is bearable, of course a little slower than what I am used to, but am kinda shocked at how fast web pages actually load on this old beast of machine...
I should run Futuremark's "Peacekeeper" browser benchmark on this thing just for laughs right now, but am not sure it would even "complete" the benchmark successfully...
Ah well, at least I am online and can surf and email for the time being...
Edit: Just run Peacekeeper benchmark, it actually finished it!! Score: 347!!!
( last time I ran Peacekeeper score on my Q9400 a month or two ago I was getting around 3000 score!!!
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