Two Aopen 975xa-YDG died on me! Why, oh, why?!

[Mastiff]

I have a carputer with an YDG board in it. I had been running the first board for one and a half year without any problems, and then it just died. In a weird way: It started when I pressed the power button, but didn't post. Just stood there with the fans blowing. So I got a new one, and that has been in the car for two months. It gets moderate use, has done maybe 50 hours since then, and today that just died. No warning. I had it fired up to fix the monitor setup (my kids had ripped out the cables, so I had to reacivate them in the ATI Control Center), and then I shut it down. Tried to start a while later, and nothing. Zip. Zero. Seemed like the same symptoms, it started, but didn't POST. And there's a LED that starts blinking when you start booting, but it only lights up very weakly.

I use an industrial power supply from Synocean, 300 watt. In the computer there's a DVD-ROM, two S-ATA disks on the regular plugs and one on an external hotplug S-ATA (the DVD hard drive that I use to rip DVD's to). There's three radeon graphics cards (two PCI-E X1600 and one PCI 7000), and a SoundBlaster Audigy. The CPU is a T2500.

I had another board of the type (bought two on eBay when the first died), and with that everything works again. But I'm not sure if I dare to use it... Do you guys think it's a pure coincidence or perhaps a problem with that type of motherboard, or could it be a problem with another component?

 

[Evilsizer]

i would thing the psu is the cause of the problem since it has happened to 2 boards.

 

[Mastiff]

I was sort of afraid of that myself. The problem is of course that it's rather expensive. Is there a way to be sure that you can think of?

 

[Evilsizer]

use a dimm on the psu to measure the voltages, other things you wont see on a dimm. is the votlage ripple this under the right conditions can cause the boards to just die all of the sudden.

i would use a board that is run soly on 12v though these boards cost more.
www.logicsupply.com has many to choose from.

 

[Mastiff]

Thanks, but they're useless for me. I use five monitors, and four of them have to be on either AGP (which isn't possible) or PCI-E. But I have done a bit more searching on another board (XTreme Systems), and it seems that a lot of people have had those boards die in exactly the same way. Most of them actually made them work again by removing the CMOS battery and leave the board on CMOS erase jumper for a long time. Gonna try that first. But on my trip tomorrow I'm using a regular PSU with an inverter!

 

[Mastiff]

Btw do you know of a way to check this with a computer running? I can attach one of my cheap mobos to it, and run a power logging program if anything like that excists.