Evil Home Stereo

Yesterday I killed my old MSI K7T266 Pro2 mainboard. It was a really good board, served me well, ran rock-solid for a long time and with my old Athlon Thunderbird 1200, one Gig of RAM, and a Radeon 9200 Pro I was even able to play WoW when I still did had an account. All I had to do is swap in one of my DTLA doorstoppers with a dummy Windows installation. Ah, the times…

There was just one annoying thing about the motherboard: You could not switch of the sensor for the CPU fan. Which was very annoying because when my old CPU fan died, I replaced it with a big (and thus silent) chassis-mounted fan and a makeshift wind tunnel made of cardboard. Worked well, except for the fact that I had to press N on each boot when the BIOS discovered that there was no fan running and started sounding an alarm while asking if it should switch off itself.

One of my more tech-savvy friends told me that it should be possible to fool the fan sensor by just bridging the sensor pin with a jumper. Well, he was wrong. For one, it doesn’t work. And if you are tired and confuse the pins in the manual (siderant: why does MSI publish their manuals as self-extracting Windows executables countaining a single PDF?), you (obviously) ground the 12V feed. Killing your BIOS.

Maybe I should have read some other information before trying stuff. Or it was just time for that system to die. Who knows.