Amanda needs a heart Transplant.

Amanda that wicked women has been partying all night, eating French fries, doing Jell-O shot and having wild sex. Now she is playing the price for it. Amanda is my wicked fast system I build from scratch. Last week she came to a screaming halt and refused to turn on. She has some problems.

She needs a new heart. The 550-watt power supply has failed, and become unstable. Normally, I’d just run a cable to MidAmerican power substation, but the Feds and the power company don’t take to kindly to that. So she is in the shop getting a new 850-Watt Power supply. I was pushing the Antec Neo HE a little to hard with everything I was trying to power. The new power supply unit should blow that problem out of the water. My first microwave oven was only 500 watts.

She also needs some cholesterol meds, because she is clogged with dust. All those fans I use for cool suck dust into Amanda like a jet engine on a B-52. I swear I going to buy a case of dust off, or maybe a mini air compressor. Which bring us to Amanda last problem. (I Hope.)

All that dust clogged a fan that cooled a chip, called a Northbridge. Basically, it a chip that has the instructions that tell the motherboard how to talk to the PCI slots and the all the other parts of the computer. If you remember back I had a problem with my twin video cards. It seems that maybe the video cards were fine, but the Northbridge was failing. The system crashing, failing video and sound cards are all symptoms of the chip set over heating and shutting down. So Amanda, need a new heart (Power Supply) and a new central nervous system (Motherboard).

The new motherboard looks really cool. The fan for the Northbridge has been replace with a copper heatsink. Here are the two boards side by side. The old motherboard is on the left the new board is on the right.