R
RWhite
Well-known member
Some of you may recall my fun, fun times trying to upgrade to an Athlon motherboard. See the posts http://www.homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?threadid=46404 and http://www.homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?threadid=47210 for the gory details.
Well, call me persistant, or just stupid, but I am going for round II. Bought a MSI K7t2 Athlon mobo (a.k.a. MS-6330). It was simply the only other Athlon motherboard I could find in town that worked with SDRAM rather than DDR. So I hooked it up last night, fired it up briefly, but have not really set it up yet. And was amused to find out from Tom's hardware ( http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q1/010117/kt133-03.html ) that this board has a somewhat defective southbridge that makes ATA-100 drives slower than ATA-66. Well, at this point I'll settle for a decent game machine.
My question - this motherboard, unlike my prior (miserable) ECS board, has the extra 4 pin 12v power connector in addition to the usual ATX power connector. Does anyone know what this does, given that the regular ATX power connector already supplies 12v to the board? I assume I need to keep both of these plugged in, but I'm just curious what it is used for.
Oh, and the warning - Got this nasty story from a not-to-bright coworker today. He was working on a friends PC over the weekend, wanted to try adding some RAM to it, so he brought along a SDRAM DIMM of his own. Unfortunately his friend's motherboard used DDR. Mistake #1, he didn't check this. Mistake #2, he put the SDRAM into a DDR slot, which it does NOT fit into, and thought it was seated (I guess the slots were obscured). He flipped on the power, smoke starts pouring out of the power supply. Needless to say the motherboard is fried. Mistake #3, he still doesn't understand WHY, so he then takes his SDRAM home with him. Mistake #4, he puts his now damaged SDRAM back into his motherboard, in its original slot, turns it on, and POOF blows up his motherboard too. So hes out two motherboards, probably cpus, probably RAM, etc... In other words, a BIG SORRY.
Moral of the story - LOOK before you upgrade.
Well, call me persistant, or just stupid, but I am going for round II. Bought a MSI K7t2 Athlon mobo (a.k.a. MS-6330). It was simply the only other Athlon motherboard I could find in town that worked with SDRAM rather than DDR. So I hooked it up last night, fired it up briefly, but have not really set it up yet. And was amused to find out from Tom's hardware ( http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q1/010117/kt133-03.html ) that this board has a somewhat defective southbridge that makes ATA-100 drives slower than ATA-66. Well, at this point I'll settle for a decent game machine.
My question - this motherboard, unlike my prior (miserable) ECS board, has the extra 4 pin 12v power connector in addition to the usual ATX power connector. Does anyone know what this does, given that the regular ATX power connector already supplies 12v to the board? I assume I need to keep both of these plugged in, but I'm just curious what it is used for.
Oh, and the warning - Got this nasty story from a not-to-bright coworker today. He was working on a friends PC over the weekend, wanted to try adding some RAM to it, so he brought along a SDRAM DIMM of his own. Unfortunately his friend's motherboard used DDR. Mistake #1, he didn't check this. Mistake #2, he put the SDRAM into a DDR slot, which it does NOT fit into, and thought it was seated (I guess the slots were obscured). He flipped on the power, smoke starts pouring out of the power supply. Needless to say the motherboard is fried. Mistake #3, he still doesn't understand WHY, so he then takes his SDRAM home with him. Mistake #4, he puts his now damaged SDRAM back into his motherboard, in its original slot, turns it on, and POOF blows up his motherboard too. So hes out two motherboards, probably cpus, probably RAM, etc... In other words, a BIG SORRY.
Moral of the story - LOOK before you upgrade.
