What’s that smell?
Nothing quite like that stinging, acrid smell of burning PCB. Just as I’m about to go to bed it hits me like a punch in the face and I immediately know what’s up. I ran into my room, yanked the power cord and fanned the machine manually trying to cool it down. I didn’t know what had happened so I touched my brand new Zalman CNSP-7000B-Cu heatsink to find it barely room temerature despite running seti@home full bore since the heatsink was installed almost two weeks ago. One of the coils close to the processor socket was glowing red hot (not usually a good sign) and caught fire, yes literally. Pretty safe to say the machine is a total loss. One of the bad parts about mini-pcs is that when one part dies you have to replace the whole box. Can’t reuse the case because micro-atx boards are usually prohibitively expensive to come by in single units.
This machine used to be my Wintendo, but when I stopped playing PC games I turned it into my main linux workstation. Now I’m glad I didn’t sell the old athlon box. Seems I’m going to be using it for a while until dual-core athlon prices come down…