I hate intel, I hate rambus!

[lordofduct]

A little while ago I tossed out this crap mobo I had and bought an MSI with alot of bells and whistles. Main thing drawing my attention was it supported RDram which I have 512MB of.

Well the mobo died on me 2 days ago. Shorted out or something, I don't know.

Can't figure out whats wrong so I thought. "lets buy a new one"... WHERE'D THEY ALL GO? Seriousily, even ebay only has like 2 and they are sellfing for god awful prices. newegg doesn't have any mobo's with a chipset to support it, same with tiger and pricewatch gah I aint diggin through that. zipzoomfly doesn't either.

So heres what exactly happened.

A little while after I got the board my system started acting up. When I turned it off sometimes it would just turn back on all by its self. I couldn't figure out why so I just put the bugger on a light switch to keep it off. (yeah i know it shoulda clicked that I should've done more back then but I couldn't see any serious problem coming from it.) Then thursday I was in my closet modding a sega saturn and had my music blasting from my computer in my bedroom when suddenly the electricity went out (I live in FL, this happens a lot. Thats what 100USD surge protectors are for). Well the electricity came back on and I went over to turn on my comp and it booted up and then just turned off after a few seconds (windows didn't even get to load) and would never turn back on. NOTHING happens.

Now, the outlet works. My monitor and speakers are on the same surge protector strip and both work fine.

The PSU works, I even swapped it with another.

It isn't shorting on the case, it acrylic, but JUST IN CASE I swapped the bastard into another case lieing about (my flatmate has many). Still nothing. I seriousily think the mobo fried. What do ya'll think?

 

[Malakai]

Sounds like what happens when a CPU fan goes out and the motherboard doesn't have auto protection on it. CPU overheats, possibly destroying the motherboard as well from the heat, and blows. Was the CPU fan still working when it blowed?

On another note, I hear ya about that God-Forsaken rambus memory. I can't understand why they would put it on desktop PCs. It's mostly on xeon servers and such now, and 2-4x the price of most other ram, if you can even find it now days. I've got a friend in the same boat. He's running a p4 1.4ghz PC w/ 256mb RAM, and he's playing star wars galaxies on it.. It creeps along terribly slowly, and he refuses to pay the high prices to upgrade the ram.

 

[lordofduct]

My system ran great. and the fan wasn't blown...

Personally I like the RDram. I get a lot of power out of it. For 5 years now I've been running the same 512MB of samsung RDram on a 2 ghz machine with a Gforce ti4200 64mb. I can play Unreal 2k4 and SoF2 at framerates just as high as my buddy who runs a athlon XP2800, 512mb of ddr and a radeon 6400 all in wonder at 8X AGP.

Shit, I can also encode mpeg2 and 4 files much faster then him. average I can encode a mpeg2 file 1 and 1/2 hours faster. (this is for average 2 hour length movies)

It just upsets me that intel and SiS (the only chipset makers I know of that make rdram supported chipsets) decided to stop making their chipsets for rdram. So in turn it makes it difficult for me to find a replacement mobo cause noone makes new motherboards that support it, I have to locate ones that haven't been sold yet, refurbished or used.

 

[it290]

Well, the Pentium 4 does kick ass for video encoding. However, it's no suprise that your ut2004 framerates are as good as his with that video card he's running. If both your machines had newer video cards, his would no doubt smoke yours, especially in more modern games.

 

[Malakai]

EBAY has a few intel/rambus motherboards. Probably your best bet, as most mom and pop computer stores aren't going to carry them.