My recent absence

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PaulStoffregen

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My Linux PC died yesterday morning, after 6 very productive years. New motherboard, CPU, memory arrives tomorrow. Confirmed my last daily backup is good, so should be back up & running soon. Writing this from a Mac I usually use only for video editing.

I'm still watching and able to answer general questions, but for the next couple days I don't have all my normal resources. If there's anything important I've missed or bugs/issues in need of investigating, please ping me early next week. Hopefully I'll be back to normal then.
 
Looks like the motherboard died, perhaps the CPU's voltage regulator? Or it could be the CPU? Already swapped the power supply, but no joy. The standby power LED on the motherboard is lit. When I press the main power button, there's a slight noise as it tries to power up, but can't. Tried with the video card removed and most other stuff disconnected, but still the same problem. It can't power up.

The chip is a LGA2011 (before v3) Sandy Bridge E and the memory is DDR3, so replacing individual parts isn't much of an option.

Haven't looked at the hard drive yet. But I did verify my daily backup from July 4 is ok.

I leave my system running 24/7, supported by an uninterruptible power supply where we swap the batteries on a 3 year schedule. It's run continuously for 6 years with maybe a couple dozen reboots. I had hoped to get another year or two before upgrading, but looks like its time is up. :(

Ordered replacement parts from Amazon yesterday. At the time of the order, everything said delivery Friday. But they changed the motherboard to Saturday. The CPU, memory and heatsink arrived just now, and tracking says they shipped the motherboard today.... so it looks like I'm waiting until tomorrow to try to get back up and running.
 
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Interesting. Most often I see HDD's going bad - lots of fans replaced in dirty surrounds - built two machines with the same power supply I had to replace each about a year apart ( though they ate some drywall dust and were presenting power 2-3X too late ) - and both are back up with a new one. Motherboards are amazingly long life - generally.

6 years updates to New gen CPU and DDR4 will be good for you.
 
6 years updates to New gen CPU and DDR4 will be good for you.

Maybe, but doesn't feel like much of an upgrade.

I got the new i7-8086K chip. It's 6 cores, but so was my Sandy Bridge E chip. It uses DDR4, but only 2 channels. My old chip used 4 channel memory (4 identical DDR3 DIMMs). The new all-core clock speed is a little higher at 4 GHz, but my old chip was running overclocked at 3.7 GHz.

At least the new board+chip supports NVMe. I'm due for a Linux reinstall soon. Will probably get that Intel 905P drive when I do...
 
Hopefully you remembered to order a chip cooler too :)

<edit> - I see 'heatsink' posted.

Ooooh - Special Edition .....
Intel 40th Anniversary Processor SKU
Limited Edition Processor

With DDR4 and at least twice the RAM speed and 5 GHz Turbo it should seem a bit faster.
 
Finally up and running, after picking up an ethernet card due to the network port not working on the new motherboard.

It is indeed quite a bit faster. A full no-compression rebuild (with warm cache) of the Teensyduino installer takes about 10 seconds (or about 12.5 with the disk cache cold, right after rebooting). It used to take ~18 seconds.

Look like all 3 of my case fans are also near the end of their life, making funny sounds when listening close with the case open in a quiet room and one doesn't always start spinning.
 
Ick on the net port being offline, perfect is so much more comforting.

That is a nice improvement in the build - wasn't long before - but taking near half is promising.
 
Looks like the motherboard died, perhaps the CPU's voltage regulator? Or it could be the CPU? Already swapped the power supply, but no joy. The standby power LED on the motherboard is lit. When I press the main power button, there's a slight noise as it tries to power up, but can't. Tried with the video card removed and most other stuff disconnected, but still the same problem. It can't power up.
Did you look for pregnant caps? That's one fairly common component that can make mobos to fail, though before total failure, they usually exhibit random reboots for some period of time. At my previous work place, we've had several dev machines fixed because they contained no longer available SW.
 
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