Ok. Shuttle board 400mhz. amd barton 2500. crucial 3200 512 ram. stock cooling. why does it fry two times in a row. getting parts from newegg. i heard about needed plastic washers to go around the screws that attach the mobo to case but i dont use them for mine. any ideas. ifve already made two comps so it cant be installation probs.

the first time it fried was cause of too small powersource, warned my friend bout that. but the second the comp ran for abotu 5 sec then fried.

when you say fry could you be more specific? and what board. I have two shuttle boards at 400 mhz. that have not done me wrong. are you using the heat sink paste?

The system fries as in the smell of burning electronics comes (first time it actually started smoking but that was cause of too little powersource). Um the shuttle board has dual ram no sata. i dont know what model. Um i didnt use thermal paste because the stock heatsink comes with a square grey thermal compound on the heatsink and the amd manual says to install heatsink straigh on processor not mentioning thermal paste. But still i cant be a cpu overheating because it happened in less then 5 sec.

Most certainly it can be a CPU frying in less than 5 seconds. Fire up a processor faster than 800Mhz or so (pulling that number out of my ass) withotu a heatsink on, and if it doesn't have thermal protection it will likely fry faster than that.

Anyway what is it that is frying? the mobo or the cpu? or the psu?

Just to let you know, i had a XP1800+ that didnt have the heat sink mounted correctly to and it fried as soon as i hit the power... I mean burnt smell, smoke and the whole nine yards all in less than ten secs. Also it cant hurt to put a little grease on the heatsink before installing too. Not too much or you might crack the die.

However on the other hand, I had a duron 1.1 Ghz that I forgot to plug the fan in on and it lasted a full minute so....

I second that... Just today i toasted my old athlon 1.1... I used the wrong CPU shim, and the heatsink never contacted the core. Turned on the PC, and within 5secs, it powers back off and smells bad. Athlons die FAST without a heatsink.

Put some grease on the processor, and put on the heatsink. Take the heatsink back off and make sure the grease has all squirted out. If so, then the heatsink is contacting it well, if not, then that is to blame.

-Plack

my bad! that last post was me. I am on a different machine that doesnt automatically log me in...

-Plack

if you mount the hsf backwards, the raised part of the cpu socket will keep the hsf from being flush with the cpu

if you smelled burning electronics, you should also be able to see where something has burned. and even if you cant see it, you should be able to smell which individual part burned up.

Can you clarify that? I have never heard of any electronics "frying" becuase of lack of power? (unless its an opamp that has signal in, without rail voltage)

I have assembled many many computers in my time and have only "fried" something once. Maybe you are getting shitty parts? (e.g. shuttle motherboards)

I am not sure how you could hook any power or such, backwords. can you clarify on what part is failing? do you have multiple machines to test which part "died"?

I hope I'm reading this wrong...

You are mounting the MOBO on posts, right? If you're screwing the sucker directly to the case, it'll arc over a capacitor or some other current-carrying component (say that 3 times fast) and it'll blow.

On the brighter (ha!) side of things, have you gotten any pretty light shows from all of this burned up computer stuff? I tried hanging a 90mm fan from my PSU grating with a twist tie... casing of the tie melted and I got the loveliest blue flash...

-jkpq45

Lol sorry guys havent been on in long. where to start.. ok so do you recomend thermal paste on the cpu even though there is already thermal compound on the heatsink? THe mobo is mounted on these little things that seperate the mobo from the case by atleats half an inch. No fireworks. um.. i guess thats it?

Yeah too little power can fry yoru stuff. ask some electronical engineer about that.

I thought about this lack of power being to blame, and since it is 5 am I came to the most basic solution. It is very possible that if the system does not have enough power the CPU fan might not spin up. I still think it is most likely you were not getting the HSF on correctly.

some diodes, transistors, and capacitors have a minimum voltage/amperage limit that must be reached before they continue to function properly. THi is why TV screens don't work when there is less than 100 volts running to them. Anyway, if a switch operated by a transistor on a circuit board is supposed to go when current in another circuit reaches a certain point, if that switch isn't getting enough power, it won't operate, and the other circuit could overheat, or cause damage to an IC for having current applied too long, or any number of other things, and ... well ... cause the burnup that mop is talking about. This is just a sample scenario, there are many others...