Re: What's your best guess?

TVeblen wrote:
Visually inspect the Southbridge. ICH5/ICH5R have a failure problem,
usually triggered by ESD (electrostatic discharge). The major meltdown
mode looks like this. When the chip burns, the motherboard will no
longer reboot.

http://web.archive.org/web/20051231121215/http://www.x86-secret.com/pics/news/q105/frout.jpg

http://onfinite.com/libraries/179057/2ea.jpg

The location of the burn mark, is right above where the USB ports
receive I/O power. All the ICH5 chips I've seen, have no heatsink
on them, so it'll be easy to check for this. Just take the side
off the computer and look.

Paul

I had this happen to my P4C800-E board when I stupidly hot plugged a USB printer. Just recently I replaced the front panel jacks on my Antec Sonata I case and the replacement Antec sent me had an extra wire which looked pretty obviously to be a ground. I drilled a hole into the steel framing on the case and attached it with a screw. Is this ground wire a fix for the electrostatic discharge problem?



Could be, but while being a bit better, it is far from perfect.
There are other precautions that would be more effective, such as
using a PCI USB2 card for the devices that frequently need to be
unplugged. If the PCI USB2 card were to get damaged, all you've
lost is $10.

Paul
.