Hi,

My CPU died recently due to poor ventilation of my case. It was under warranty so I got a replacement and the company I bought it from confirmed that it had definitely burnt out. My new CPU arrived today. I'd never installed a CPU before but I did my homework and it's all correctly positioned and I'm pretty sure I used the right amount of thermal paste.

First time I booted up with everything connected, the power cable to the floppy drive rather dramatically caught fire. I've cut off the melted cable and bound the stump with insulating tape, and have chucked the floppy. Everything else looked untouched. Now, when I turn the computer on it seems fine at first - hard drive starts whirring, motherboard beeps, display is normal. After a short while, and before Windows loads, the computer turns itself off.

I think it's gotta be one of the following:
The motherboard was damaged when the CPU originally burnt out;
BIOS is confused by the new CPU;
I did something wrong installing the new CPU;
Something is overheating, perhaps related to this morning's fire.

My system is an Athlon XP 3200, with an asus A7V400 motherboard and a gig of RAM, on Windows XP. I swapped out the power supply and the hard drive and the problem remained. I've also tried starting it with a brand new hard drive and a Windows CD and it seems to start trying to copy files, but it still shuts down after 30 seconds or a minute.

Hope someone can help, I'm out of ideas!

Helen

Hi there Helen , welcome to PCHF.

I would first remove the remains of the floppydrive cable , but if after a burnt cpu youre FD cable starts to burn then i would think there is something shorting out somewhere and there is a big change youre motherboard is damaged to.

But first i would remove the burnt cable.

Hi joe5,

I removed the cable straight away, cut it off before the damage and insulated the remains. I don't think the CPU and floppy are related - after the CPU went I could power the system up fine. Nothing happened cos the CPU was dead, but nothing caught on fire either!

How do I tell if the mb is damaged?

Cheers,

Helen

look? fo little black lines acrros the motherboard. it will look like hmmm tread marks... But guessing from what your saying your motherboard is fired... If not If you know how to take a motherboard out I would take it out and reseat it making sure it is not touching any metal!

Hi Merlin,

The motherboard looks fine. Also, I thought that if it shorted out on the case it'd fail to start up at all?

Helen

No not always, if it is shorting out it more than likely will start up but with of course reboots and fires etc.. :wow:

But I am guessing from what I see somthing is overheating. Start the pc and kjust go into the bios and leave it there for a good 10 minutes open the case(while it is still on) and touch the hard drive and feel around see how hot it is in there. After 10 minutes of being in just the bios it should not be very hot.