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Blown Motherboard from ATA-100 Cables?

Posted by Cliff on from the now-that's-odd dept.

Dragan Lazin asks: "I recently bought a couple of rounded ATA-100 cables from an online store; very ingenious actually and they have a nice color: blue ;-) Problem is, when I installed the cables, 16 capacitors on my motherboard blew - right between the CPU and the parallel port header. This is an Abit KA7-100 mobo. What the hell causes this kind of damage? I'm trying to get a refund and a new mobo from the company. Did anyone ever experience this?"

2 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. A short? by kurtras · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't know how the cables go from short to round, could the rounding process have caused a short? Do you know if the capacitors had anything to do with the IDE bus, or could they be unrelated?

  2. Re:What kind are they? by msaavedra · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Been wondering why they weren't rounded earlier

    The reason ide cables have traditionally been ribbon-shaped is to minimize cross-talk. Perhaps the round cables use some sort of pair-twisting scheme, or maybe they use shielding. Or perhaps they just decided that cross-talk wasn't really as much of a problem as the engineers originally thought.
    --
    "Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
    --Henry David Thoreau