PC woes

[Dave Plowman (News)]

That the same MB or an alternative with at least the same number of PCI slots, two IDE, floppy, etc, isn't available new now.

[Mark]

Are you looking at uATX or ATX MBs? How many PCI slots do you need? You may be able to free up a slot by using onboard sound?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

After paying a fortune for a sound card with balanced inputs?

[PeterMcC]

Dave Plowman (News) wrote in

If you want to identify how many slots you need and what processor you're wanting to use, there might be some suggestions - or even someone with a suitable board lying around after an upgrade.

And I know what you mean about sound cards - I've some old ISA slot AWE64 Golds around here somewhere that must have cost a couple of hundred pounds apiece around a decade ago.

What sound card are you using?*

[Mark]

Gigabyte GA-8I865 Notstateoftheart :( But 3xPCI 2xIDE 1xfloppy 2xSATA socket 775 On board audio can be disabled

-

[Dave Plowman (News)]

[Dave Plowman (News)]

ASI 5020. Cost as much as the computer. ;-)

[Mark]

Well if it would do as a replacement they are still available from Amazon Ebay etc

will be increasingly difficult to get an old spec (3xPCI slot) board like this in the future.

-

[geoff]

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes

I can always ring Richard and ask him to ring me as soon as they have one, I can even pick it up

but again - I said if you email me a photo, I'll see if I have a suitable mbd lying around

[dennis]

That's why they make firewire sound cards, So they fit modern PCs. 8-)

[dennis]

before you click

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Thanks Geoff, but at the moment it's working perfectly.

I'm certainly curious to know what the fault might be or have been. Semiconductor faults, dry joints or cracks in a PCB track usually get worse with heat. Perhaps there was a bit of crud shorting something and the last clean shifted it.

[dennis]

You provided the answer yourself a while back.. temp 72+, now 45. The heatsink wasn't working correctly.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

You really are a pratt, aren't you?

[dennis]

You really don't want to believe me do you? Give me another explanation of what you said were the symptoms and what you did that fixed it. I will stand by the most logical until the evidence you provided says otherwise, if you think it is something that upsets you then that is *your problem*.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

No - because you either haven't read properly or understood the problem.

If it were a heatsink problem the fault would have appeared within a reasonably consistent time from a cold switch on. But it didn't. Sometimes the machine would run for hours - sometimes only a minute or so. Now obviously CPU activity will have an effect on the core temperature - but not *that* great.

If it were the logical explanation and the cure worked I'd not have bothered posting here as it's one of the first things I'd looked at long before posting. I've had the damn thing off several times and each time fitted it in exactly the same way. As I said you obviously haven't seen this type as it's not possible to fit it incorrectly physically. Leaving the only variation being the thermal transfer compound. Which obviously was correctly used by the even coverage observed on removal and the effort needed to separate the two.

But I've said all this before and you chose to ignore it.

[stuart noble]

How very uk.d-i-y! Problem goes away but we can still have a row about what it might have been.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Trouble is like all such things it will likely come back...

[stuart noble]

The anxiety of it all! :-)

[Mark]

Why not buy a spare off ebay? You can pick up an Asus A8V for peanuts.

HTH.