Blown Motherboard from ATA-100 Cables?

Dragan Lazin asks: "I recently bought a couple of rounded ATA-100 cables from an online store; very ingenious actually and they have a nice color: blue ;-) Problem is, when I installed the cables, 16 capacitors on my motherboard blew - right between the CPU and the parallel port header. This is an Abit KA7-100 mobo. What the hell causes this kind of damage? I'm trying to get a refund and a new mobo from the company. Did anyone ever experience this?"

A short?

I don't know how the cables go from short to round, could the rounding process have caused a short? Do you know if the capacitors had anything to do with the IDE bus, or could they be unrelated?

who did you get the cable from?

just want to avoid those cables. i'm too poor to buy those fancy round cables, but for those of us with disposable incomes, it may be important.

What kind are they?

Are those the same ones on thinkgeek that are in the banner ads on slashdot? I've been thinking of picking some up... Been wondering why they weren't rounded earlier, hope this isn't why.

Re:What kind are they?

Been wondering why they weren't rounded earlier

The reason ide cables have traditionally been ribbon-shaped is to minimize cross-talk. Perhaps the round cables use some sort of pair-twisting scheme, or maybe they use shielding. Or perhaps they just decided that cross-talk wasn't really as much of a problem as the engineers originally thought.

Bad Cable, Bad Board?

Had you used the board before trying out the round cables? If so, the most logical explaination is a bad cable...It does happen, a bad crimp or solder can easily cause a short.

KidA

How would a cable make capacitors blow up?

Some how, 12 or more volts has been shorted onto the 3.3 or 5 volt supply. If you look closely at the motherboard, you'll probably see heat damage around one trace on the motherboard. You may even be able to see where the damage starts. Look for a loose screw or metal trash underneath the motherboard.

Capacitors blow up from too much heat, which for a DC power supply filtering capacitor implies too much voltage. Capacitors are in parallel with the power supply. Something put too high a voltage across the capacitors.

Unless I'm really confused, the highest voltage on the IDE connector is only 5 volts, and all of the pins on the IDE connector are either ground or are compatible with 5 volts. You can hurt the logic chips and the power supply by shorting stuff on the IDE connector, but you won't blow up the capacitors.

The Cables caused the Problem?!?

Well, I'm not an EE expert, so I won't say if it's possible or not. But in my new PC I use ATA100 Rounded Cables (and for that matter a rounded Floppy Cable) in my machine and have had no problem.

Personally it sounds more like a power surge to me than a problem with the cables...

Rounded cables probably not the problem

I setup a OpenGL workstation using all rounded cables from 1coolpc.com and, other than the fact that the cables don't fit very tightly and liek to fall out if stressed, everything seems to be going alright for the company that purchased the puter. I have 2 of them in my system as well, which seem to be working. Perhaps it was something else?

Not sure if this would help...

I somehow doubt the cable had anything to do with it - other people's postings here seem to reflect this, and also give many good tips/ideas as to what happened.

One thing to consider, though, is whether the parallel port controller chip also is the IDE controller as well - sometimes motherboard manufacturers use these "super"-chips as a means to cut costs. I am involved in a group "hacking" the Acer NT-150 set-top box, and the controller chip for the parallel port on it also has some IDE controller functions, as well as floppy drive functions. Basically, they made it so you could build a "funky" parallel cable, hook it up to a floppy drive, plug the other end into the parallel port, and that becomes the floppy port - otherwise it is for a printer.

There may be a connection in your case - who knows?

This sort of thing just happened to me

I have an ABIT KA7 (not -100) that blew all the capacitors on the processor side of the board. I still havent figured it out exactly, but I guessed that it was a combination of maybe over-overclocking without sufficient cooling, or when I plugged in my printer it had a bad ground. That or it was just a nice random occurance to make me go and spend money :-).

Not certain on either one, but it made me buy a new board and processor (and ram... DDR is god) and now I dont use my printer any more because I really dont want to fry this one.

More or less, the things that others have said about the rounded cables not being the problem are probably right. Not nearly enough voltage to blow all those caps.

Oh well. I havent tested out my processor to see if it is still okay yet. I want to use it for a server so I hope it is.

Who did Abit buy the capacitors from?

Sometimes electrolytics go bad just because they go bad, the dielectric gets punctured (electrically) at an unforseen weak spot, shorting the high side to ground, current flows, genereates heat, and the thing goes bang and swells up or blows off part of the can.

Seeing as how we've got at least 3 Abit owners posting this problem so far, and not all are using ATA-100 round cables, I'd suspect that Abit got a bad run of caps from their subcontractor, although some sort of voltage regulator problem that fed those caps too much voltage or let a reverse polarity spike get through to them could also be at fault. Are all of y'all using the same brand power supply?

Gnnn. Can't... resist... suggesting...

...that this is an "undocumented feature" of WinXP hardware product verification. >>> ;-) <<<

Power Supply

You may also want to check the pot settings on your power supply, I have run across boards that pumped out anywhere from 11.1 to 13 volts and 3.9 to 6.7 volts. The pot can be tweaked to help regulate the output.

Had this happen to me

Sort of had the same problem, but I didn't have the round cables. The capacitors turned to slag after I'd had the board running for 6-7 months. I had noticed an odd popping sound emanating from my box occasionally, but the computer continued to work, so I attributed the popping to my imagination, and a lack of the proper drugs, on an alternating basis. I sent it back to Abit with an RMA and a $25 check for processing, and they sent me a brand new one, cables and all. It took about two weeks from failure to replacement. None of my other hardware was affected adversely. On a side note, the melted capacitors looked really cool. I brought the board into the office and co-workers were impressed all around!

New M.B.??

Was the motherboard new? Maybe the Caps were faulty and they were going to blow anyway regardless of the new ATA cables?