Moterboard? Rack case? PSU? or something else?

[ranj]

Dear All

 

In my 9 years working on the hardware side of IT. I have never come across this type of problem when building PC's.

 

The Story.

 

The school has recently purchased 26 motherboard bundles along with 550W PSU, hard drives and dvd drives from Novatech. We do most of our PC hardware from these boys. In our school we have a data centre which houses all of our computers. We have 47u racks which then house these PC's which are kept in 2U racks.

 

In one of the IT rooms the machines were coming towards the end of their life so I decided that we keep the rack cases and replace all the rest of the components. So we placed an order.I ordered one on eval to ensure everything would work ok before we placed an order for the rest. I did test the basics and tested WOL to ensure the mobo would startup if a script ran and it worked.

 

Now we have taken delivery of these components and we have had nothing but problems but the issue is the hardware they have sent us is working perfectly fine. I have tested this with another normal tower machine case and plugged everything into it and the mobo works perfectly well along with the rest of the components.

 

The problems we seem to be having is when you plug everything in, as soon as you plug the power cable into the PSU the motherboard turns on and stays on, this shouldnt happen, the PC should briefly turn on and then turn off.

Another issue that is happening is if you hold the power button on the case the computer will normally turn off but in this case as soon as you turn the power off the computer switches on again. Windows has installed successfully using our syspreped ghost images and if i send an RPC call to shutdown the machine, the machine should switch off but what seems to be happening is as soon as it begins to shutdown and runs through that process, rather than shuting down it will go into a sleep mode and again this shouldn't be happening. If I do operations in a normal tower case everything works exactly as it should.

 

We tried reseting the BIOS, upgrading the BIOS (even though it had the latest firmware on) and tried different PSU's but still getting these problems. we have tried running the mobo outside the case on a piece of cardboard but still get these symptons as we thought the rack case might be causing issues such as shorting the motherboard.

 

On the case we have a custom solution which has been built for us which allows remote restarting of the computers and this talks directly to the reset header on the Mobo. we have a PCI blanking plate which has a hole drilled through it and this allows the reset solution to work. We thought this may be issue as well but have completley illiminated this by taking this out.

 

Just for your information the spec of what we have purchased is the following:

 

Asus P5E-VM Do

Intel Core 2 Duo E6750

2Gb Ram

 

Has anyone suffered similar problems. I think i have ruled out the case, different PSU's reboot solution, BIOS but just dont understand what else I haven't tried. I have checked the ASUS site and theres no such luck on there.

 

To throw one more problem into the equation, in BIOS when you go to hardware monitor it takes a long time to get into this option, once you are in though it gives an incorrect reading of the CPU temp (-0.5oc) and the CPU fan speed is 65535RPM!! Looked on the ASUS website and it is a known issue but they say just upgrade the BIOS. problem is i already have the latest BIOS so am completly stumpted.

 

Any advice on this would be most appreciated...

[Joanne]

I've had problems with cases in the past. In one case nothing would work... wouldn't even switch on. In the other was fine.

 

It's just one of those things!

 

As for the bios, maybe try and find an older version to see if that works?

 

Check with the company to see if there was a faulty batch of motherboards.... you never know!

[Jona]

The usual case problem is that the motherboard is shorting on the case metal somewhere. Try loosening the screws slightly and also using those little card o-rings you get (http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=47085&&source=14&doy=search) to space the board off of the case.

 

Cheers

Jona

Edited March 10, 2008 by Jona

[Michael]

Interesting problem, but from what you're describing, the problem does sound like the motherboard apart from you mentioned:

 

If I do operations in a normal tower case everything works exactly as it should.

 

Which points to the rackmounted case. Are you sure the power switch isn't wedged down? And secondly, have you double checked the power, reset and hard drive headers are connected correctly?

[torledo]

Why don't you try to contacting you're supplier....As this is a custom solution they've provided, and you've purchased in considerable quantity i think you should get them to come out and have a look at one of the machines. To see if they can nail down the problem.

[Butuz]

Sounds to me like either you have a faulty power or reset switch on the case - or the motherboard is shorting out on the underside. Check that all of your motherboard screw down mounting points are in the correct place. Cases now come with a multitude of possible screw points and you have to make sure they are in the correct position for your motherboard or you could get shorts.

 

As for self building workstations and servers - I really wouldnt reccomend it at all, you have low economies of scale, it creates high work load for you, and you have no support should something go wrong.

 

Butuz