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What is the 6-pin power connector on an HP ProDesk?

I have an HP ProDesk 600 G1 desktop PC, and I'm upgrading it with a new graphics card and a new power supply.

Now, the problem I'm having is that the motherboard in the PC doesn't have a standard 24-pin ATX power connector. Instead it has a 6-pin power connector and a 4-pin next to the CPU.

The 4-pin isn't a problem, my new PSU has that, but the 6-pin has me worried... Can I just connect the PCI-e 6-pin power cable to the motherboard, or do i need a custom PSU?

EDIT: Connector image

Is it possible to run a motherboard in distilled water?

I have read that distilled water doesn't conduct electricity. This, in other words, means that we can submerge electronic devices like PCs/laptops in it and run them without any problem. I haven't seen much information about this on the internet, but it should be possible.

So, can you really run a PC in distilled water? I don't know if you can, but I think if you could, it would start rusting/corroding in a few days. ;)

How can I find out what motherboard is in my computer?

I want to find out the exact model of my computer's motherboard so that I can see what sort of memory chip, graphics cards and other components it supports.

I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

Tiny copper waffle squares inside computer

I've been hearing a sound from inside my MSI GE60 laptop for a while now, so I opened it up to find that these two tiny copper waffle squares came loose. They were originally stuck to the board with some black adhesive, so I stuck them on again, but a few days later, they came loose again.

After removing them from the laptop entirely, I haven't noticed any differences in performance, temperature, etc. They look too small to be heat sinks, and they're only attached to corresponding black squares on the board. Needless to say, much searching for "copper waffles on motherboard" and the like turned up nothing at all.

What are they? And what should I do about them?

Installed RAM 20 GB (16 GB usable)

I have Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit) OS installed. My motherboard is able to handle up to 32 GB of RAM.

I recently upgraded my computer to 20 GB of RAM, but the computer says installed RAM is 20 GB (16 GB usable).

I have four slots on the MB, and I installed two 8 GB RAM closest to the CPU and two 2 GB RAM on the remaining slots.

I made sure the RAM are the same (DDR3 1600 MHz)

What am I doing wrong? Why am I seeing this issue in my computer's Control Panel Home?

Just in case it matters, I also installed GTX 770 GPU 2 GB memory.

Here is the specification on my motherboard: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8P67_LE/specifications/.

What limits a motherboard from supporting more memory?

My specific question is with the ASUS M3N78-VM motherboard that my home server uses. I currently have 4x2GB installed for a total of 8GB but I was hoping to upgrade to say 16GB (4x4GB). The official specifications of that motherboard says it only supports up to 8GB but it was released back when only 2GB sticks were available. What, if any, would prevent it from working with 4GB sticks now that 4GB sticks are available?

My general question is with motherboards in general... what would prevent a motherboard from working with bigger sticks if its all just the same type (DDR2 for example and same speeds) of memory?

What is the brown slot near the CPU socket on a Pentium 1 motherboard, and what is it used for?

What is this slot called and what is it for on a Pentium 1 motherboard?

Here I give you the Asus P/I-P55T2P4 rev 2.1 board:

How to wire the LPT and COM port headers on a motherboard?

I would like to add an LPT and a COM port to my computer. The board has no LPT or COM port on the I/O panel on the back. However, there are LPT and COM port headers on the board. You can see these pictured in the image below.

So instead of buying one of those PCI cards with LPT and COM ports, I decided to use the built-in logic of the motherboard. PCI cards take up space and I have to worry about drivers, which platform I'm using (Linux vs. Windows), and what not.

I bought one of these combined LPT and COM port I/O plates. But I'm not sure how to wire it. The headers on the motherboard are not boxed, so there's no way telling the orientation in which to connect the cables. Then there's also the confusion with pin labeling.

LPT port

This is the pinout used by the motherboard (captured from the manual).

Is this according to standard? What standard would that be?... This doesn't look like IEEE1284 to me. Here's the parallel port pinout according to Wikipedia.

Pin     Signal
--------------
1       Strobe
2       Data0
3       Data1
4       Data2
5       Data3
6       Data4
7       Data5
8       Data6
9       Data7
10      Ack
11      Busy
12      Paper-out
13      Select
14      Linefeed
15      Error
16      Reset
17      Select-printer
18      Ground
19      Ground
20      Ground
21      Ground
22      Ground
23      Ground
24      Ground
25      Ground

Here's a diagram:

Don't they have to match up? I must guess what those dumb abbreviations used by motherboard manufacturer actually mean. Some of them apparent, others are not. Like, STB stands for Strobe, and it's on the first pin, so that's good. But why is BUSY on pin 21 here and on pin 11 there? It seems like they messed it up, got it wrong or something, perhaps to make you buy their own damn I/O plates. Or perhaps there are different wirings for different version and revisions of the port?

And what's with the little minus signs? Is that indicating something? Perhaps low vs. high logic? They don't tell any of this shit in the manual. Like they expect me to figure out on my own. It's a Gigabyte board by the way. I asked about it over at the GGTS (Gigabyte Global Tech Support) and their reply was that they couldn't give me any more details, because it is "company secret". The folks at Gigabyte must have lost their mind! Or something...

COM port

This one seems to be OK, right? This seems to be the standard pinout.

Can't boot flash drive on GIGABYTE motherboard

Situation

When I try to boot from my flash drive, my GIGABYTE 970A-UD3 motherboard returns this:

Loading Operating System ...
Boot error

All other motherboards I've tried support booting from that flash drive (and a backup flash drive). The operating systems I tried on both flash drives were created with usb-creator-gtk (Ubuntu USB Startup Disk Creator).

I know that the motherboard understands that there is an operating system on the flash drives because when I erase them, it complains in an ALL CAPS RAGE that there isn't an operating system, which is correct.

How can I boot a flash drive that's bootable from other motherboards on this motherboard?

Qualification

• This question is not a duplicate of this one because directly writing to the flash drive as an ISO 9660 (dd if=operating_system.iso of=/dev/sdb) still does not have the motherboard recognize the operating system.
• This question should be a duplicate of this one because I provide more information not provided by that poster.
• This forum thread has broken links and does not have a solution to my problem.
• Nobody knows what's going on in this forum thread.

PC shutting down after 30 minutes, even when on BIOS screen

I have a desktop PC that is just over a year old that I use daily for work. It's running Windows 8.1, has 16GB RAM and an i7 CPU. It has a 256GB Samsung 840 SSD (Windows + programs) along with a 1TB Seagate HDD (documents). The motherboard is an ASUS B85M-G. The graphics card is a 2GB ZOTAC GT640, with two monitors attached.

As of Friday last week it is shutting down (without warning) after 30 minutes of uptime. I have not installed any new hardware recently, nor installed any new software (other than whatever Windows updates came along last week).

By "shutdown" I mean that it is as if the power cable was pulled from the PC. Screen goes blank, cooling fans stop spinning, and I can hear a "ping" from the 1TB HDD as the drive head parks.

Initial speculation suggested that this was a classic PSU issue, so I obtained a replacement power supply and plugged that in this morning. Same problem.

While in Windows I have run temperature monitoring software that shows that the CPU cores are happily down at around 40°C, and the GPU is at a similar temperature. The innards of the PC are clean and free of dust, and all fans are spinning.

BIOS reports that CPU temperature, fan speeds and voltages are fine:

Following a shutdown and restart I've inspected the Windows event logs, but have not found anything that explains the shutdown, only a log entry that says that Windows was not shut down properly.

I have also discovered that the problem persists if I just enter the system BIOS on boot and let the PC sit there for half an hour (so it's not a Windows issue...)

I have upgraded the BIOS since I bought the PC, but this was back in May.

I have checked the RAM using Memtest86+, this reported no issues but sadly was only able to get about 60% of the way through before the PC shutdown.

For what it's worth, there is very little clearance between the heat sink on the passively-cooled graphics card and the RAM. However the heat sink is generally cool to the touch. There is also not much clearance between the CPU heat sink fan and the graphics card, but again temperatures are fine. Photo below illustrates the internals...

Can anyone suggest what might be going on here?

Edit - Troubleshooting progress

Since originally posting this question I've tried the following in an attempt to isolate the issue. In all cases the PC still shutdown after 30 minutes:

• Unplugged optical drive, entered BIOS screen
• Removed graphics card, allowed to boot to windows (presumably, as I remembered I'd previously disabled onboard graphics in BIOS so couldn't get a picture on my monitor
• Replaced graphics card with another, unplugged all USB devices apart from mouse and keyboard, entered BIOS screen
• Unplugged SSD and HDD, entered BIOS screen
• Removed backup battery for BIOS, waited half an hour, put battery still in. Booted and went to BIOS screen

What does + in the memory type of DDR4 RAM mean?

Some mainboard producers add a + to the specification of supported memory types (e.g. for ASRock X99 Extreme 3 supports DDR4-3000+). Does DDR4-3000+ somehow differ from DDR4-3000? The wikipedia article on DDR-SDRAM doesn't contain the sign+ or mention anything related. I don't see the difference reflected in selection filters in online stores.

Why won't my motherboard work with two CPUs?

I (very) recently built a computer with the following specifications:

• (x2) Intel Xeon X5650;
• Supermicro X8DTI-F Motherboard;
• AMD Radeon R9 280X;
• 16GB DDR3 FB 1333MHz RAM (4x 4GB);
• 1TB Seagate Constellation SED (enterprise HDD);
• RM850 PSU

Now, the system runs perfectly fine with one CPU installed (installed Windows, games, programming, etc, are fine), but the system will not initialize both CPUs when both are installed.

I have a PCI POST card (the same as shown below), and it stays on '00' when both CPUs are installed; the same code it uses when no CPUs are installed:

Both CPUs work and so do both sockets (basically, everything works except when I try to use both CPUs at once), so I'm not entirely sure what's going on here. I have also tried another PSU and resetting the CMOS, none have worked.

There is a BIOS update available for my motherboard, but applying it hasn't fixed the issue either.

Here's the details in CPU-Z of each CPU:

I took a screenshot of CPU-Z, and then shut-down and replaced CPU #1 with CPU #2.

To recap:

• Not a power issue (I'm using the correct cables);
• Not a CPU issue (others have been able to get the exact same CPUs to work with the same motherboard);
• No issue with the actual sockets (no bent pins);
• Updated BIOS, no change
• Reset CMOS, no change

What could be wrong here?

The seller of the motherboard is sending me a replacement board that has been tested to work with dual CPUs, but I'm wondering if there could be something simple that I'm missing?

I've looked into it in more detail and the QPI is not going to its full 6.4GHz (even when forced); instead it's throttling to 3.2GHz, sacrificing some of the Xeon's performance.

Motherboard went up in flames

I just recently purchased the ECS A55F2-M3, FM2 Motherboard.

I have a couple pictures to show you:

I think it is a voltage regulator that had went up in flames.

My questions are:

• What caused this to happen?
• Could this have happened because of my power supply (only a 220W stock HP PSU) or was this a manufacturing defect?
• What will I have to do? Buy a new motherboard?

Fitting a Motherboard into a Computer Case

I'm interested in building my own computer. I saw a motherboard and CPU that I want to buy from Tiger Direct.

My question is has to do with computer cases and motherboards.

1. Are all motherboards one size? i.e. 15" x 15"
2. If they're not, can any motherboard go into any computer case?
3. If not, will I need to purchase hardware to fit a motherboard into a computer case.

Onboard RAID vs Software RAID

My motherboard, an Asus M4a79t Deluxe, advertises RAID 0/1/5 capabilities. My limited understanding is that onboard RAID is better than software RAID. Is this necessarily true? Is an onboard RAID controller closer in performance to a software controller or a dedicated hardware controller?