My lowly PC options...

[GHoosdum]

Well, with two PC failures in two weeks, I'm left with a few piles of parts, and my only working PC is the notebook I've been trying to sell!

Here are the parts that I know are shot, and I plan to RMA them:
Antec True380 PSU
Asus K8N motherboard

Here are the parts that I think may be shot, I still need to test them:
Antec SL400 PSU (probably bad)
AMD64 3000+ CPU (possibly good)

Here are the parts that I know are still good, but I don't know for certain about all:
1GB Corsair TwinX PC3200
1GB Corsair Value PC3200
Chaintech 7NIL1 motherboard
Athlon XP 2500+
Radeon 9600
Radeon 9800 Pro (needs new fan)
Various HDDs

My possible failure-causing points may be:
Wall outlet
Case

Each system died after about 3-4 days of constant uptime, the first PSU has a rattle, while the second does not.

I need to decide what to do next. Most of my courses of action will require me to sell everything I don't use for that course of action.

Here is what I'm thinking:
1. Keep notebook, upgrade RAM and HDD to 7200 RPM
2. Make a working PC out of the XP2500+ and Chaintech mobo
3. Buy a new Socket-754 mobo if A64 CPU works
4. Upgrade to Socket-939 (this would likely require selling everything for pretty good prices)

I need some input here, folks. Recommend a new course of action if the above possiblities don't seem optimal to you.

[muddocktor]

GH, sounds like you had a hell of a run of bad luck there, man. :eek:

I would suggest that you just build up the Barton until after Christmas and test out your A64 proc to see if it's still good. If it is, then you might run across a good deal on a 754 mobo from someone who is upgrading to socket 939 for Christmas.

I'm wondering if your Asus mobo is what fried the 2 psu's. Unless you are getting some pretty bad power surges through the ower line, which I would think would be pretty noticable. I think the laptop would get old real fast, depending on it to be your main machine. Even the 7200 rpm notebook drives are slower than a desktop hard drive (I have one on my lappy, it's livable though).

As far as for upgrading to 939, it's going to cost you much more than the first 2 options and also AMD is supposed to be transitioning to socket M2 sometime this year. So if you already haven't bought into 939 yet and can make you a system that can tide you over until M2 is released, then hold off. As long as you can have a system that runs decently, I don't think it's worth buying into technology that's on the reverse side of the technology slope.

[GHoosdum]

GH, sounds like you had a hell of a run of bad luck there, man. :eek:

I would suggest that you just build up the Barton until after Christmas and test out your A64 proc to see if it's still good. If it is, then you might run across a good deal on a 754 mobo from someone who is upgrading to socket 939 for Christmas.

I'm wondering if your Asus mobo is what fried the 2 psu's. Unless you are getting some pretty bad power surges through the ower line, which I would think would be pretty noticable. I think the laptop would get old real fast, depending on it to be your main machine. Even the 7200 rpm notebook drives are slower than a desktop hard drive (I have one on my lappy, it's livable though).

As far as for upgrading to 939, it's going to cost you much more than the first 2 options and also AMD is supposed to be transitioning to socket M2 sometime this year. So if you already haven't bought into 939 yet and can make you a system that can tide you over until M2 is released, then hold off. As long as you can have a system that runs decently, I don't think it's worth buying into technology that's on the reverse side of the technology slope.

Good point. I was planning on going M2 later on anyway, and the system I had built with the Socket 754 CPU would tide me over, but I'm not sure about the Barton in that respect.

I am fairly certain that the Asus mobo wasn't the cause of demise of the second PSU, because I only had it hooked to that mobo for a few minutes to test the mobo after the first PSU went - that's when I got the fan-on-for-a-few-seconds behavior from it that disconcerted me so much.

To be more clear with you, the first system that died was the system with the Asus mobo, A64 CPU, and the True380 PSU. The system that died while I was away on vacation was the Chaintech mobo, Barton CPU, and SL400 PSU. I was able to get the bare board with CPU, RAM, and video card to boot when hooked into the power button and PSU on my Aria case... I may just have to stick all that stuff back in my Aria case and consider myself 'good to go' until M2. I wanted to give my system a transplant into the new Aluminum case until I could finish the Aria mod, but I'm 100 yards away from trusting that case now for some reason, since 2 PCs died inside it... do you think that anything related to the case may have contributed to the demise?

The only thing I can think of is that there was a surge to the PSU, and that the PSU grounded through the mobo instead of the case, or simply died in the second instance, but that's pretty farfetched since the aluminum should have conduced the electricity away even better than steel would have.

As far as the possibility of bad surges, that may be a possible culprit. We've had issues with the power at the house lately. It goes out at least once a week, and it went out on my sister when she was house-sitting, at about 3AM on the first night we were away. She had shut down the UPS after that, because it was beeping, so nothing should have been able to get through to the PC after that. I'll have to check with her to see if she was able to use the PC the rest of the week, to pin down exactly when it may have died.