Marlon the computer – and it will be the computer Marlon I am referring to henceforth unless otherwise noted – has always been a problem.
Briefly, there seemed to just be something inherently wrong or broken with the system which I never exactly minded since it had been a very generous gift from Marlon the person the friend of mine. So Marlon (back to the computer) was always just a project machine, something to tinker with, and I tried to remember how to remedy the seemingly continuous BIOS corruption but Gigabyte didn’t make the self repair terribly easy to activate.
And it certainly didn’t do a stand out job on its own. However, it gets huge credit for always eventually allowing the system to… be not bricked.
At any rate, Marlon got shelved for a while since, with its boot issues and seemingly flaky or broken onboard video ports, it was basically a lost cause. Throw in the intense burning hatred it caused me to develop where mSATA devices are concerned (and sure the single mSATA drive I owned was probably just bad after so much testing), and Marlon was still remembered as a great gift but would be serving me no use.
Come around to the current disassembly project, and most of the hobby systems are parted back out, Marlon still remained within a valuable Cooler Master n400 chassis with a less valuable no-name power supply and an unusual CPU cooling solution from once famed Zalmann.
So it was time to take it apart.
It was routine – disconnected the SATA SSD and set it aside, removed the board from the case and stripped out the psu, shelving the psu and returning the case safely to its box, and then the large copper cooler was removed. If you’re following along, next the RAM which is barely a thing, and then the CPU.
I cleaned what turned out to be far, far too little thermal paste (enough function though – that would not have been the root of my past issues) and removed the CPU only to immediately see something unexpected: a solid wad of dust covering a handful of the pads of the CPU. Enough dust, by my estimation, to block three or four pins from making solid contact with the mainboard socket.
A heavy sigh accompanied a deflated feeling.
How long had that been there?
What were those specific pins that they would be unimportant enough that the system could still run but important enough that they could throw occasional onboard graphics issues and/or boot issues bad enough to corrupt the bios? And did they have anything to do with the mSATA problems? Could it be any of those things? Possibly all of them?
There was only one thing to do.
Re-assembly.
Feeling annoyed, I put a semblance of Marlon back together, a decidedly jury-rigged, highly temporary set up, and attempted to boot it with the newly ‘cleaned’ cpu.
Of course it booted right up.
If you know me you know this meant I was going to have to do a fresh installation to verify the system including using that long socked away mSATA SSD to see how well the system ran now newly without a giant wad of dust in the socket.
Like not like dust that you get on countertops after a week away.
Like dust like your laundry lint filter after half a dozen loads.
Aside from a slightly hesitant initial boot… Windows 10 installed perfectly fine onto the damned mSATA device. Crucially, it made it through a reboot – a thing it notoriously could NOT reliably do – and here I am with Marlon 1.1, humming along, just a little warm due to an inadequate cooler thrown on for testing.
Just for poops and giggles I threw in this old USB 2.0/Firewire PCI (PCI, not PCIe) card I still had around that also never worked right.
I don’t… I mean… what even is the lesson here? For my dollar the only thing I can really take away is this sense that you can pour over a system as long as you want, trouble shoot in every way you know and every way you can think of, but possibly still miss what the problem is. It isn’t unreasonable to think the system just has a bad mSATA slot, or has a corrupted BIOS chip. These things happen. But I guess now I get to file away “make sure the CPU socket doesn’t have a chunk of crap in it”.
Welcome Back, Marlon system. Since Marlon has nostalgia associated with it having been a gift, like Patrick before it, I don’t consider it to be eligible for sale, although give away to someone in need of a nearly vintage system maybe. What I mean is, for now Marlon stays, better than before.
Marlon is based on the Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H ATX mainboard with an Intel i5-3570k CPU cooled by a Zalmann CNPS8900. 16 GB DDR3-1600 MHz is installed (4×4 GB) and is a Corsair XMS3 kit. Storage, unexpectedly, is handled by a socketed mSATA device, specifically the Samsung SM841 250 GB SATAII drive. SATAII is sort of a shame but the difference vs SATAIII will probably never be realized. Everything is housed in an old favorite: the Cooler Master Elite 360 slim ATX case and is powered by an old standby of the eVGA 430 watt non-modular 80Plus White grade power supply. The case features front headphone and microphone jacks and two USB 2.0 ports. One additional 120mm fan has been mounted in the side panel to support the CPU cooler, since there is no other active cooling beyond the CPU and the PSU, but even this fan may not be necessary. Nothing else has been added to the PCIe 3.0 x16 (x16), x16 (x4), or the two x1 (x1) slots, nor has that USB 2.0/Firewire 400 card been left in one of the two PCI slots.