I had some of that last night. Problem was, it was real smoke, and not the magic kind. Magic smoke smells different than other smoke.
It probably smells like burning money. I don't know what burning money smells like, so I can't say for sure.
That's what it's starting to smell like..
No smoke of any variety. As a matter of fact, there was ... nothing. Probably punishment for trying to salvage stuff from an older box instead of buying new and straying from mobo brands I normally use. But Linux doesn't need NEW stuff, and all I wanted to do was replicate the box it was on without getting a motherboard that used the nVidia chipset that melts, and that still had a pata channel on it so I could reuse the old hard drive and dvd... OK, so I'm cheap...
I found a mobo with AM2+-AM3 socket and ability to use either DDR2 or DDR3 (but not both simultaneously) and the AMD chipset which I thought was a good deal because if in the future I wanted to upgrade the cpu to the 'latest' AM3 Phenom or whatever it is now, I could do that and also then switch to the DDR3 memory..
Put the cpu/heatsink/memory/ on the mobo, installed it in the box, and hooked all the pluggythings up. Before I hooked up the hard drives and dvd I wanted to boot into bios to see what's what and verify that it was alive.
But it's dead, Jim... With no flashbangs, no smoke, no blinky lights, nada. Dead without even wearing the telltale red shirt. Stone cold dead. (Well, when I push the power button, it does light the pretty blue power light that halos the button - I would be impressed by that if the cpu started and offered an indication of same by, say, turning on the system fans, but that didn't happen and I'm not impressed by a lying power button blue light special.)
So now I have to consider options first of which is tell the seller he/they sold me a defective mobo - of course using EBay's messaging so that the EBay folk have a record of the correspondence in case I need them to extract the refund should it come to that.
In the meantime, I'll look at some other brands of mobo's (I usually use MSI or Asus, but this board was - you guessed it - cheaper.)
Guess I have to dredge up another project while this one sits in limbo..
” I don’t know what burning money smells like,”
Visit the White House.