How Good Things Can Go Bad: The Antec VSK-2000
23 ianuarie 2011, 01:51am
A friend (thanks Marius!) recommended a case for me: the Antec VSK-2000 mid-tower. I waited anxiously to get it home after ordering it, then it finally got here. After I moved all the stuff from the old case to the new one, including all 11 coolers in it (funny thing, I started counting with Marius and initially I thought they were 4; then after a recount I figured out they're 5, then 6, again 8 and finally, only after a complete disassembly of the old system, I counted 11), I rebooted the new case.
So far, so good, the LED on the motherboard shows me that life flows through its veins... I press the I/O button, coolers go crazy and one could hear the beautiful sound of coldness spreading throughout the entire case aş electrons and protons start to flow in and out of the CPU. Then, just three seconds later, hell breaks loose: all of a sudden, everything stops. No lights, no coolers, no power, nothing...
I take a deep breath then start thinking of the details: first, the motherboard shuts down because there has to be a problem with some device installed. I only added some extra memory (one extra reason to that of changing the case to one that has a better airflow), so I had to see what caused this. One can easily see the mathematics involved in this: being given 4 memory modules of the same type and same series, each having the same CAS latency, voltage (2.1V) of course and furthermore being of the same capacity (the only difference being one was version part numbers, two were 1.1, the others were 1.2), and having 4 available memory slots, how many permutations can one do to find out all possible working startup combinations successfully? Well, I didn't bother with that too much. Because even after the first permutation I did, the computer was still dead - no LEDs blinking, no coolers, no nothing. Then I noticed that the power cable was somehow slipping out of its placeholder in the motherboard, I replugged it in and voilà! The sound of the previous 3-seconds success was back again! But then again, it lasted for another 3 seconds only, too... because everything shut off again after another precise 3 seconds.
So eventually I started unplugging all the devices out, and when the only thing left was the CPU, the motherboard, an older memory module (that used to work for a few years until then) and the power source, and the problem still persisted, it was pretty obvious that the issue was more serious than I had initially thought. Given that I usually perform hardware handling without wearing any protection equipment, I thought this has to do something with the electrostatical discharge my body has probably put into the board I was carrying from one case to the other earlier. With that in mind, I kept thinking of how a new board would look like, until I stumbled upon something very interesting - while connecting the case's connectors to the pins on the motherboard (for making possible USB port access on the front-side and also for making the I/O and reset buttons work properly), I switched the reset button's connector with that of the I/O power button. And since I only connected the reset button to the motherboard's power pins, on the very next press of that button the system started its engine just fine, without being shutdown automatically after just 3 seconds!
Now it all came to me naturally. There was, most likely, a short-circuit inside the connector of the I/O power button in this new case I just bought! That always caused the I/O power button to be pressed, and that's why the system booted up fine and turned off itself automatically after just 3 seconds. Of course, returning the case for such a flaw was a probability I wanted to ignore for now, plus that it was unlikely that this type of flaw for that connector was there by design, so I eventually figured out what to do (after counting about 5 and a half hours of previous attempts) - I switched the two connectors (and now the I/O power button uses the reset button's connector which works fine) and, in order to have a functional reset button aş well, I placed there the connector of the I/O button leaving the voltage pin in plain air - and placing the ground pin of the connector into the voltage pin of motherboard's reset switch. Since the reset button only needs an impulse signal to ensure a proper reboot signal for the motherboard, I thought that would suffice - and it actually did. So in total, about 6 hours of work and attempts have finally paid off.
Now for the good sides of this case - it has got the best airflow I've ever had for the past 12 years - the looks are pretty decent and, besides the small case glitch, everything else pays off.
