Motherboard damaged by agp card?

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Last night I installed an Asrock 939dual board in a new case. In the manual it says not to use 3.3v agp cards because it can damage the motherboard. So I look up my agp card (geforce4 440mx) and find it's a x8, so has to be 1.5v right? So I think everything's ok. When I install this board and switch on, I get a slight crackling noise and a small puff of smoke from the agp card.

OK, I know that card is finished, but do you think I've damaged the mobo? It was an old video card so might have just died on its own right? There are no burn marks on the mobo. Would be gutted if that's gone as well. Could I have damaged the cpu or ram as well?

Thanks for any insight!
 
Hello and welcome to Techspot.

It is possible that your mobo/cpu has been damaged.

However, without trying a different video card you won`t find out for sure.

Regards Howard :wave: :wave:
 
open your case and check if the CPU has been fried. I think it should be ok. Go find an old TNT or TNT2 video card, put it in your AGP slot and see if it works.
 
Thanks for the replies.

Nothing looks fried inside. But then again the agp card doesn't look fried either and that was where the small puff of smoke came from (could have been an electrolytic failing I suppose). I'm worried about sticking old video cards in there because the mobo manual warns about 3.3v cards causing possible damage to the mobo. Do you know if I'm right that an nVidia GeForce4 MX 440-8X is definitely 1.5v?
 
I found out what was causing the problem. A small (hardly visible) blob of solder was shorting out two tracks underneath the motherboard. It was around the southbridge controller and agp slot.

Do you think this is far enough away from the cpu and memory to not affect them?
 
terry1958 said:
I found out what was causing the problem. A small (hardly visible) blob of solder was shorting out two tracks underneath the motherboard. It was around the southbridge controller and agp slot.

Do you think this is far enough away from the cpu and memory to not affect them?

The best thing to do, would be to rma the mobo.

Regards Howard :)
 
Yeah, I think I'll have to. The problem is I need this pc for work (image manipulation) and the one I'm using to write this is about 6 times slower. If I send the mobo back and they find it's OK, I'll have to pay £11.75 plus all postage costs! Then what if the cpu was fried? More delays....

Can't believe the headache an almost invisible blob of solder has caused me. :mad:
 
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