Blown Motherboard from ATA-100 Cables?

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?"

Comments

How would a cable make capacitors blow up?

[hamjudo]

Some how, 12 or more volts has been shorted onto the 3.3 or 5 volt supply. If you look closely at the motherboard, you'll probably see heat damage around one trace on the motherboard. You may even be able to see where the damage starts. Look for a loose screw or metal trash underneath the motherboard.

Capacitors blow up from too much heat, which for a DC power supply filtering capacitor implies too much voltage. Capacitors are in parallel with the power supply. Something put too high a voltage across the capacitors.

Unless I'm really confused, the highest voltage on the IDE connector is only 5 volts, and all of the pins on the IDE connector are either ground or are compatible with 5 volts. You can hurt the logic chips and the power supply by shorting stuff on the IDE connector, but you won't blow up the capacitors.

Re:What kind are they?

[msaavedra]

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.