Yesterday I fried my first
processor.
I know that this not the earthshattering news that you, kind noder, normally expect from a daylog, as a node like this normally deals with teenage angst, death, loss and other significant life events.
Still, I have to find closure and I am a teensy weensy bit pissed off, as:
- a) there is the obvious financial loss. A new AMD Athlon 2400 sets you back 150 NZ $, and I have to order the bloody thing again (in the sleepy town of 12000 inhabitants you will probably find only 10 people who know what an Athlon actually is), and at this moment I don't even know whether my Motherboard (A MSI KT 600 A) is fried as well.
- b) I am obviously annoyed with myself, as it was completely and utterly my fault:
You see, I thought after building, er, four Athlon based computers running OpenBSD, Ubuntu Linux and Mepis here in the privacy of my own home I thought I'd already achieved ultra l33t hackz0r status and the next machine was going to be the machine that I was wanting to potter around with, running obscure OS's like Plan 9, SkyOS, ReactOS and Syllable on my first overclocked machine. Everything was going smoothly, I had a very nice case, an old PCI graphic card, enough ram and HD's to set up the IT infrastructure for a medium-sized third world country like New Zealand. Looking at the CPU - frequency jumpers and my enormous taiwanese processor cooler, I set the jumpers to 200 MHZ. As my other Athlon's were running smoothly on ca 160 MHZ with their normal bog standard fan's, I thought, hey, what can happen. Unfortunately I interrupted the assembly process for half an hour to have a coffee, and when I came back I forgot about the custum cooler and whacked the normal AMD fan on the processor.
So, everything happened as it had to: The machine booted fine, I switched into the BIOS setup utility and there the machine froze. Repeated booting with all other hardware disconnected and featuring a different videocard did not bring solace, so now I have to give the bloody shell to my local PC-workshop so the other geek in town can have a look with his multimeter to see what exactly went wrong.
Sigh.
And the moral of this little epic? Ultra - l33t Hackz0r status can't be achieved without embarassing setbacks.