Asus P5KC ( New Motherboard)

Well the holidays are here, finally! Suprinsingly I passed every exam and test I had, and now it's 3 months of immortality. But while most other people, aka normal people, like to start off the holiday by finishing left over work, or by seeing some old friends they haven't had a chance to see in a long time, I prefer to waste my time, energy and money trying to fix my PC. Anyway here's what happened:

For the last 1 year and a half my PC had an Intel D946Gzis motherboard that ran smoothly with a Pentium D CPU at 3.4 Ghz , and 1 gb of RAM. After I installed Vista I realised that 1GB of RAM is not really enought to fit my demands so I went out and bought myself a 2Gb kit. After a few weeks of using the new cards, and about 20 Blue Screens of Death ( BSOD) I realised they weren't actually compatible with the Intel motherboard. So I went back to the old ones.

But last week I decided it was finally time to change my motherboard, as I now had the time and the money to buy a new one and perhaps fix all the problems that may appear ( I was actually expecting the RAM not to be compatible, or at the most to do a clean install of Vista).

Well I went out and bought me a brand new Asus P5KC board with an Intel Chipset specifically asking if it would support the dual layered RAM I had with me. SO I bought it, went back home, unboxed it filled with anticipation, and finally I began to take part out of my PC to install it. Now I have taken motherboards out before but never really with the intent of them still working afterwards so this time I had to be very careful. I don't really know why but at one point when I was taking out the CPU I accidentally touched the pins and a few other circuits you are really not supposed to but I didn't pay it much thought.

After finally ..finaaaally figuring out how the LEDs and the Power Switch cable were supposed to be fitted ( i had no diagram of the motherboard's circuits) I was ready to test it. Plugged in the power cable, LED on the motherboard came on , pushed the power switch ..nothing happened. Ok i figured out I might have plugged something in the wrong way ..so I rechecked everything, tried it again ..still nothing happened. For a full one hour I stood there cheking and recheking every possible jumper and cable I could see, trying to figure out what I had done wrong.

On the verge of despair I realised I could switch the reset button to simply switch the power on or off ..so I did that. Success it worked! The PC powerd up , checked RAM, checked drives, ( i couldn't remember which of my HDDs was the bootable one so I had to find out through trial and error), failed to boot. I said to myself no big deal, I just went into BIOS and ..wooa.. the PC shut down. Ok ..restart. Again go into BIOS ..switched the booting order of the hdds and before it even had a chance to try and boot, it had shut down again. Something must be very wrong I thought to myself and restarted one more time.

I directly checked the CPU temperature as I knew that might be the cause. Well I was right .. the BIOS told me that my CPU was making water boil with a temperature of about 125 C ( that's about 257 Fahrenheit ). Wow I was stunned ..the cooler must not be working and ..wow ... So I checked everything again, the cooler was working, the radiator was properly set, and the CPU's actual temp was somewhere close to 40C.

So i checked everything one more time, and then I use a different PC and search the internet for what might be causing this. I found out something interesting: the PC doesn't measure the temperature using a thermal sensor, but actually runs an electrical current throught the CPU and then measures some data and converts it using a formula thus giving the temperature of the conductor. If for any reason ( such as touching the conductor leaving grease or other substances on it ) the current behaves differently than it normaly would then you'll get false readings. So I realised I had touched the pins on the CPU most likely leaving that thermal jelly thing ( that's found on the bottom of the cooler) on it. There are no certified ways of cleaning a CPU ..actually if anything, it's strongly counter-advised. But I wasn't completely sure that this was the cause of it.

So I tested the CPU on the old motherboard, adn it worked with no problems. Then I looked around the net some more and found out that many people had had issues with the Asus P5K with weird temperatures readings because of buggy BIOSs.The obvious resolve was to update the BIOS , and Asus makes this easy with their EZFlash feature that let's you update directly from a flash drive without having to boot into DOS from a floppy. So I get the latest BIOS from Asus and try updating it. But after checking the file, the system says that the file has no Asus signature and it wouldn't let me update it.

I assumed the motherboard MUST be faulty and decided to switch back to the old one until I got the replacement. But big surprise ..after switching back ..the computer would simply restart itself a few times and then shut down. Somewhere along the way the CPU had fried. So the next day I went out and used up the money i was planning to use for a trip ..to buy a brand new Intel Quad Core Q6600. Great I think to myself, now everything should be fine.

So i go back home, and set the NEW processor into the NEW motherboard. It starts, 60C in BIOS ..that's decent, and then ..after 10 more seconds ..just as I thought things were back to normal ..the PC shut down again, no obvious cause. So I get the motherboard, go back to the shop and togheter with one of the guys there we tested it with different processors. It worked like a charm, no problems, no issues, no restarting no nothing.

Feeling a little embarased I took the board back ..stripped my PC .. took everything apart and then started to add components one by one to try and diagnose what the hell was going on. Weird part is ..it worked perfectly, after i came back with it I simply didn't have any other issues . Except for the fact I had to do a clean install of Vista x64 ( due to the new processor) everything was perfect, and still is.

Now after these two days I've learned a few things ..such as NEVER TOUCH THE INSIDE OF THE CPU, and could probably give a lot of tips if asked.

Well that's it. For questions or suggestions post a comment.
Cheers, Geeky.