On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 15:04:03 -0800, Mike Henley wrote:

Hi... thanks to a distraction i ended up connecting the 4 pin 12v atx
power supply from the psu to the motherboard\cpu the wrong way... it
was a 180 the wrong way... it sounded like a firecracker when i turned
on the machine and it went dead.... everything else was connected
right just that one stupid 4 pin 12v...

what might've got damaged... would the motherboard only got
damaged.... or the motherboard and cpu too... would other parts i had
connected like memory, graphics card, hdd etc damaged too... thanks

(it's an amd athlon 64 and asus k8v) :-(

Look for burned components on the motherboard. The firecraker sound was
most probably a capacitor blowing up. The motherboard is probably toast.
If the DC to DC converter went it might have taken the CPU with it, but
there is a good chance that the converter sacrificed itself and didn't
take the CPU with it. Your RAM is probably OK but if -12 volts passed
through the CPU it could have taken out the RAM also. The graphics card is
on the otherside of the bridge chip so I suspect that that's OK unless the
AGP slot gets power from the 4 pin 12V connector. The disk and CDROM will
be fine if that's any comfort.

BTW isn't the 4 pin connector keyed? I would have thought that it would be
impossible to do what you did.