Motherboard /processor upgrade ?

[tony sayer]

Well he must have been dealing with some dodgy outfits;!..

Nope NP. All the screens, hard drives and network switches and other IT gear we've had thru here for a long time now have been in manufactures sealed boxes. The only ex dem bit of gear we had was a 1 KVA APC ups which was 50 quid rather then 350 sheets . Mind you it still cooked batts like only they can;(..

Nope .. we fit them and have done so for a long time and we don't go to excessive lengths with antistatic, just normal conductive boxes to store semi devices when required and ally foil to wrap them in sometimes and no problems with pin alignment either;!..

Well I can understand that but sometimes we need them a bit different to just normal desktop machines..

Well that sort of thing sometimes happens but I really can't say we've had any duff equipment for a very long time now..

Well what do U expect;!..

Your lucky they were plain out of stock for some things we needed there the other week but generally there very good;!...

And about the only good one left in the area. Which isn't surprising and I doubt they make anything to speak of selling machines, but I do expect they do make money selling their know how;)...

[tony sayer]

Aren't they supposed to be OK with the some i00 odd G or similar?...

Why?, having dome just thats the other month MB and CPU are doing fine!...

[David WE Roberts]

Interested that you seem to dislike AsRock - care to expand further? I have an AsRock Z68 Extreme 4 Gen3

[Bob Eager]

When ordering from CPCC, I am always careful about what items I mix in the same order - for exactly that reason. I quite often get the tubs of dishwasher powder during the 'free carriage for orders over £10' WEBFREE offers.

[Andy Champ]

You'll find that is something like "dropped half an inch onto concrete".

Andy

[Part Timer]

I noted that last year when trying to get my hands on a P4 for my mum to replace my 2003-acquired P3 which she had since 2005. The P3 was only 3 years old when I got it and the P4 older. Both boxes had original HDDs which I didn't use.

[John Rumm]

Quite possibly... and it sounds like plenty, however its alarming how easy it is to exceed that. Quick example: lets say you drop a HDD onto your desk - from a height of 1 cm

If we apply v^2 = u^2 + 2as we get v^2 = 0 + 2 x 10 x 0.01

So it hits the desk at about 0.45 m/sec

Now your desk is hard, but it must give a bit, so lets say if flexes (or dents) by a tenth of a mm under the impact:

0 = 0.45 + 2a x 0.0001

-0.45 / 0.0001 / 2 = 2250 m/sec^2 or about 225g

I would hope so after a month... report back in 18 ;-)

(not suggesting asrock are universally "bad" - just that some brands operate in a different price and quality bracket and don't seem to enjoy the longevity of some others - if you are a frequent upgrader, then this may not matter)

[John Rumm]

Dislike would be way too strong... "Leaning toward others in preference" might be closer

(to be fair - the point I was making was that if you cut corners on motherboard quality you lower the overall system reliability even if the CPU is identical - and asrock was just the first name that came to mind in the slightly cheaper end of the market)

I have had a pretty good experience with boards by asus - and hence they are what I use in my own systems. Some of the others also offer good facilities / price points etc, and I would certainly consider them - asrock and MSI being examples. However IME they have not been quite as reliable. I used to like gigabyte years ago for the feature set etc, but got burned by rather too many failures and slightly suspect BIOS issues for my liking)

OOI, I just had a look through the dead mobo pile I have waiting for when I can be bothered to re-cap them - 3 MSI, one Acer, and one Biostar

- no asrock there at the moment ;-) (the MSI ones I may repair since they have reasonably decent C2D E7600 CPUs and 4GB RAM - the others are probably not worth it)

[tony sayer]

OK .. there is an outfit round here who has a hard drive "mincer" it does just that . His firm collects PC's takes the hard drives out and puts them in a machine that literally minces them into small chunks!..

We once tried to wreck some hard drives but hitting them with a hammer and throwing them at the floor not dropping them, throwing them. It was very surprising just how robust they were even with that treatment.

I suspect that it depends where the heads are WRT the drive surface at any given time..

The main problems we've had with PC's are...

Motherboards .. almost all caused by the duff capacitors that were made a while ago.

Power units .. mainly because of their uber low price something has to be underrated hence the failures, but this applies to a lot of other consumer grade stuff..

Hard drives but these seem to be better in recent years..

CD ROM drives .. but in more recent times seem to be better.

Memory and processors hardly any..

[tony sayer]

Are they really worth the time re-capping these days?..

As duff caps are the main source of MB failures, but that factory I believe has either closed or they have now re instated the missing ingredient!...

[John Rumm]

Yes, very much so... I have destroyed a few, and it takes a 14lb sledge to do serious damage to them.

As with lots of these issues, the effect of impact damage is not necessarily immediate failure, but can manifest as a reduction in life. Much the same as with static damage.

Mostly I would say the same here, although I have had a recent slew of failures on relatively recent kit with bad caps again.

I had that conversation with one of our customers a while back. He wanted a quote for four new machines, and then queried the price saying he could buy the same spec off the internet for less. So I explained to him that the systems I was promoting were not really the same spec but were built to order units, with business class PSUs, decent mobos etc and came preloaded with a much closer match to his final software stack since we could spec what went on them. He was not convinced about the PSU argument since he believed they had suffered very few PSU failures in the past. Alas completely missing the irony that he was making my point for me, since we supplied the bulk of their PCs with decent PSUs!

In the end I ordered him "off the shelf" systems from our normal system builder at a price closer to his "cheaper" ones. I pointed out to him later that it took about an extra hour and a half of our time per machine to configure them for use, and that more than wiped out the savings.

Yup, don't think I have had many failures recently.

Memory, now and then. Processors, I can only recall one failure in over

20 years! (that was actually recently on a i3 box, still under warranty)

[John Rumm]

Not usually unless they are rare boards. I did some Ideq "cube" boards a while back since getting replacements that fit the SFF cases is very difficult.

Having said that, when you have the whole board with decent CPU and RAM etc, then it can be worth it for a cheap upgrade on older systems if you can recap them in 30 mins with a couple of quids worth of parts.

Well that is what I heard as well, but have still been getting cap failures on boards well after the time the dodgy ones were supposed to be out of the supply channel.

Not had any of the ones using so called "mil spec" metal can caps yet. (not sure if they really are Mil spec - but they certainly seem better than the normal radial electrolytics.

[charles]

when I took the hard drive out of a desktop machine I then undid some screws and removed the cover and then the disk. It can be bent by putting it in vice and htting it witha hammer. Some of the coating flakes off, too.

cheaper than paying someone to use a 'mincer'.

[Java Jive]

I usually put a cold chisel into mine before I sling them out.

Most, probably all, drives these days move the heads automatically on power off to the 'Landing Zone' where no data is kept.

One duff Gigabyte motherboard from a dodgy supplier who no longer gets my business, where the chipset fan failed and the chipset fried, replaced by a lesser specced one that wouldn't work reliably with SATA disks.

One duff PSU from same dodgy supplier in same order.

I've had a Connor, an IBM, and a WD go down. The WD was the most annoying, as it was a relatively new 500GB drive, just out of guarantee! The other two were acceptably old anyway.

My favourite trick with CD/DVD drives is to forget to put the tray back in when I've removed the disk, and then knocking the tray out with my knee as I get up from the desk. I've done this with two or three drives now, but in each case I've been able to get the tray back in, even though sometimes it has meant partially dismantling the drive, and it's worked fine ever since.

1 non-Intel CPU which fried within days when some software on my PC somehow put it into an internal infinite loop. I changed the motherboard and CPU for an Intel PIII. 1 RAM stick failure (later on in same PC - cause and effect?). 1 mismatched paired RAM from same dodgy supplier in the same order as above.

[Java Jive]

[geoff]

Light bulbs, for example

[Huge]

[Bob Eager]

Yep.

[David WE Roberts]

[tony sayer]

In article , charles scribeth thus

Ah!, but you don't get a certificate of destruction for that to comply with some BS approval system!...