- October
- 22nd
- 2008
back from the death
Posted by MaEl in: Bits-and-Bytes, Work-Study Comments
The server had a major downtime due to unbootable motherboard. Previously the same thing had happen but I just sent the motherboard(EPIA-SN 18000G) for RMA. Without knowing the cause, a week later they sent me a brand new motherboard.
Now It happen again!! I’m trying to install a mini-pci WLAN card, when it happened. I though I had damaged it again.. maybe electrostatic.. when pushing the power button, CPU fan spin but no POST. Maybe the BIOS somehow got damage so I tried reseting the BIOS, unplug the power, remove battery.. none of them worked.
Half frustrated, I left the system unplug for a week. Today, after a week of researching about how BIOS work, BIOS boot process..etc, I got some idea that maybe the CPU got overheated even before it could run the BIOS. That’s explain why there’s no boot beep.
Curiously, I take apart the heatsink and examined it. Maybe I just void my waranty by doing this. The CPU and northbridge share the same heatsink. On the CPU side, they used a thermal pad while on the northbridge side they used a thermal paste(white in color). Maybe because the nanoBGA CPU height is a little bit lower than the northbridge. There’s a crack in the themal pad (maybe I touched the heatsink to hard while installing the mini-pci card).
I remove the thermal pad(and the brown protector) and apply some Artic Silver thermal paste. Put them back and the system alive again. Now with much lower temperature thanks to the efficient thermal transfer of Artic Silver.
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2008-10-27 at 1.59 am
[...] Silver thermal paste and I remove the brown barrier at the cpu side to make sure it touch the cpu. piXca.net back from the death Before I find this, I thought bios was buggy. Have done hundred of bios reset with no luck. Hope [...]