hokay well i gots me a little story for that you should hear:
i was working on ventilation for my grapics card, and i came to the conclusion that i needed a pci slot fan that would work as an intake. now, it just so happens that i own a pci slot fan. however, when i got it out, i was dismayed to find that it could not be reversed, and would only work as an exhaust. that set me thinking, and i decided "since if you reverse the current through a motor it spins in reverse, why not try that with the fan?" i figured that there was no reason it shouldnt work, and the worst case scenario was that i blew my already useless pci slot fan.
ACT II
so i cut the two wires leading from the molex plug to the fan. i stripped a small amount from each one, and then wired the red wire to the black and the black wire to the red. so theoretically everything should work now. the motor would spin in reverse, and the fan would suck air in instead of blowing it out. so i plugged everything back in, and turned my system on.
ACT III
hmmm. nothing from the fan. it didnt spin in either direction, didnt give any indication of doing anything at all. i switched the wires back, and lo and behold, it worked again. so i tried one more time. FRAILURE!!! again nothing from the fan.
now for the bad part:
while the system was still on and the fan reversed, i accidentally touched the exposed parts of both wires. aka the red wire from the molex plug, the black wire from the molex plug, the red wire from the fan, and the black wire from the fan all made contact at the same time. this rather large spark flew from the two wires, and the computer immediately shut off. and would not turn back on again. i tried different things for several minutes, becoming increasingly panicky. i reset the power switch on the psu, and unplugged it for 5 minutes. when i turned it on again it worked.
now for the more bad part (act 5?)
when i first built this system, my corsair xms2 ram did not work at its rated speed and timings. naturally i OCed it back to its standard specs. when the computer booted up again though, it said that the overclock had failed. i did not understand this at first, because i could not think of any OC that i had performed, as the ram had worked fine before. but i was going through my bios when i noticed that the ram was un OCed. i naturally set it back to what it should be at. however when i saved my settings and exited, the computer did not reboot. when i did a hard shutdown and rebooted, it gave me the same message about the OC failing. i played around with the settings in bios, and through trial and error discovered that the setting that was causing the problem was when i changed the option that says "determine DRAM timings from SPD". changing the frequency to the rated DDR2-800 caused no problems. it wasnt changing the timings that was causing the problem either. it was just that one thing that said "determine DRAM timings from SPD". i could set the timings to anything if that was set to manual and it would fail. but if i set it to auto, the computer would boot. the timings are not causing the problem, just that setting.
ACT VI (damn is this long)
so basically, did i break my mobo, ram, or both. i have since flashed the bios, and it didnt help. i reset the cmos also. no help. id like to determine how much damage i did, whether it is fixable, and whether using this computer is likely to damage anything else (aka is my psu a time bomb)?
any help AT ALL on this problem would be appreciated. any similar experiences would be great to hear of.
Thank anyone who makes it this far for reading my gigantinormous post. PLEASE help me.
i was working on ventilation for my grapics card, and i came to the conclusion that i needed a pci slot fan that would work as an intake. now, it just so happens that i own a pci slot fan. however, when i got it out, i was dismayed to find that it could not be reversed, and would only work as an exhaust. that set me thinking, and i decided "since if you reverse the current through a motor it spins in reverse, why not try that with the fan?" i figured that there was no reason it shouldnt work, and the worst case scenario was that i blew my already useless pci slot fan.
ACT II
so i cut the two wires leading from the molex plug to the fan. i stripped a small amount from each one, and then wired the red wire to the black and the black wire to the red. so theoretically everything should work now. the motor would spin in reverse, and the fan would suck air in instead of blowing it out. so i plugged everything back in, and turned my system on.
ACT III
hmmm. nothing from the fan. it didnt spin in either direction, didnt give any indication of doing anything at all. i switched the wires back, and lo and behold, it worked again. so i tried one more time. FRAILURE!!! again nothing from the fan.
now for the bad part:
while the system was still on and the fan reversed, i accidentally touched the exposed parts of both wires. aka the red wire from the molex plug, the black wire from the molex plug, the red wire from the fan, and the black wire from the fan all made contact at the same time. this rather large spark flew from the two wires, and the computer immediately shut off. and would not turn back on again. i tried different things for several minutes, becoming increasingly panicky. i reset the power switch on the psu, and unplugged it for 5 minutes. when i turned it on again it worked.
now for the more bad part (act 5?)
when i first built this system, my corsair xms2 ram did not work at its rated speed and timings. naturally i OCed it back to its standard specs. when the computer booted up again though, it said that the overclock had failed. i did not understand this at first, because i could not think of any OC that i had performed, as the ram had worked fine before. but i was going through my bios when i noticed that the ram was un OCed. i naturally set it back to what it should be at. however when i saved my settings and exited, the computer did not reboot. when i did a hard shutdown and rebooted, it gave me the same message about the OC failing. i played around with the settings in bios, and through trial and error discovered that the setting that was causing the problem was when i changed the option that says "determine DRAM timings from SPD". changing the frequency to the rated DDR2-800 caused no problems. it wasnt changing the timings that was causing the problem either. it was just that one thing that said "determine DRAM timings from SPD". i could set the timings to anything if that was set to manual and it would fail. but if i set it to auto, the computer would boot. the timings are not causing the problem, just that setting.
ACT VI (damn is this long)
so basically, did i break my mobo, ram, or both. i have since flashed the bios, and it didnt help. i reset the cmos also. no help. id like to determine how much damage i did, whether it is fixable, and whether using this computer is likely to damage anything else (aka is my psu a time bomb)?
any help AT ALL on this problem would be appreciated. any similar experiences would be great to hear of.
Thank anyone who makes it this far for reading my gigantinormous post. PLEASE help me.