Albatron died?????

I just bought a new albatron px845pev pro that smoked on startup. The component that died looked like a regulator. It is marked Q14 and is located at the front left edge of the board as viewed from the rear (near the ATX power connector and memory slots) The component was marked APL1581. I am thinking that I just got a bad board, but would feel better if I knew exactly what could have caused this thing to smoke. I RMA'ed the board back to NewEgg, upon reading the reviews, it seems as though another person has had two bad boards as well. Any thoughts or comments. ( I did go back to verify that the other components, power supply, vid card, memory are working in another box) I was unable to test the processor, but I did get one long beep out of the alby, so I am assuming that it is still functional. I did verify that the mb wasn't grounding out somewhere. I have not tested the actual voltages out of the PS, but l did use it to run another board.

Components are as follows:
1 Albatron PX845PEV PRO retail (purple box)
1 Thermaltake 420W pure power PS
512 Meg GeIL PC-3500 Ultra platinum ram
2.4 C1 stepping
Sapphire 9500 Pro
and WD 80meg JB edition

TIA for your comments

Sorry about that board coldfoot. That chip is the ram voltage regulator, don't know why it smoked though. I think I've heard that it isn't even spec'ed up to 2.8, which can be set in the bios, but I've never heard of them burning out. You probably just got a really bad board. I have had 2 albys from newegg and one from gameve and believe me that they are very different. I'm guessing that albatron just has really poor quality control. All my boards have worked (worked as in didn't self destruct, not as in worked perfectly), but I can't say I'm happy with them. Let me/us know what happens with a new board. Also I'd be interested to know if your pci lock will work in games with that radeon 9500, and your onboard sound with the radeon too (my pci lock and sound don't work with the radeon, a few people have noticed this also). Anyway, good luck.

Probably not the issue, but I have seen boards where people have tried putting SDram on a DDR board (don't as me how they got it in, but apparently they did), or not getting the ram slotted in completely and it fries those little regulators. Only times I can remember seeing it happen though. Can you check and see if the ram is still good? (although in all cases I've seen it has still been fine...no expert though, I've only seen this like 3 times!)

Dead Albatron

My memory is 1 512MB DDR PC-3500 ULTRA Platinum made by Geil so that wasn't a problem did get to check memory out in another board seems to O.K. Still waiting on a replacement board from Newegg. If next board is a problem will probably go with a different motherboard. Will reply with final results.

Recieved a new motherboard from Newegg reinstalled everything. No smoke so apparently the first board had a problem. Been runnning for a little over a week now no issues yet. Running my P4 2.4 at 2.9 seems rock steady will report if issues arise.
COLDFOOT