Epic Total Meltdown of my 3 card Scope System

[cortone]

Valis, yes poor phrasing on my part.

If the batteries were a problem within the UPS, it should have protections that will prevent damage to attached devices. The UPS will not help in the event that components in the computer itself died.

Assuming the final card is also still functional, I am suggesting the most likely points of failure. If that card is now dead, it may be the source of the event that damaged other parts of the system.

In terms of probabilities, the source of the event that caused damage is far more likely to have occured within the computer itself (main, PSU, DSP card). It's not impossible that one of the PSUs caused the damage, but it is a very low probability.

[valis]

Most of the failures I’ve had on computers have been the power supply or a hard drive back when we used spinning drives. Every time I’ve had a power supply fail it’s taken out something on the motherboard, no matter how carefully I buffed the power being supplied to it. I use more than just a UPS, I make sure that I have full sine wave filtering on the UPS and I use upstream voltage regulators to clamp down on the voltage before it even reaches the UPS. And yet motherboards still fail, especially those made between 2003 and 2008, there were a lot of flawed capacitors running around back then.

[BRG]

I took the dead FSP SAGA+ 400R PSU apart to retrieve a Noctua 120mm fan I had installed years ago. Big cracked solder joint failure identified, likely causing the death of my PCI bus/slots. Somewhat perplexed that everything else still works fine. A tribute to Gigabyte perhaps.

[BRG]

Does anyone know if our Scope cards require the legacy -5V rail on the PSU? Corsair just told me their new ones do NOT have -5V.

[astroman]

never heard of -5V supply lines...
you probably meant -12V, which is quite common for opamps and I‘d expect that on the cards.
(just dunno for sure, but could check... yes, it‘s there: PCI pin 1 (-12V) is routed to IO board header of Pulsar II)

[BRG]

never heard of -5V supply lines...
you probably meant -12V, which is quite common for opamps and I‘d expect that on the cards.
(just dunno for sure, but could check... yes, it‘s there: PCI pin 1 (-12V) is routed to IO board header of Pulsar II)

ATX v1.x had -5V supplied to PCI pin #A5, which is the era our cards were designed from. I'm currently trying to verify the -5V need from Germany. Since all my cards work fine in an older system, and all my troubles emerged with the new PSU, I now suspect this as the reason.

[cortone]

I think by the time Creamware was designing the Pulsar cards, -5V was already becoming a legacy requirement in system design, in particular for the old ISA bus. It likely dropped from component designs entirely more than 20 years ago.

There are many original Pulsars that have been upgraded into newer systems with good success. It will be interesting to hear SC's response.

If I'm undrerstanding correctly, your original PSU has been identified as a failure. It's possible that the attached mainboard has been partially damaged without total failure and the Pulsar card is more sensitive than the other cards you are testing. That could happen to any of the voltage rails.

[garyb]

cortone, yes.