Subj : USB port issue -follo
To   : Ky Moffet
From : Barry Martin
Date : Tue May 05 2020 10:45:00


Hi Ky!

 >   KM> Might be nothing you can see, unfortunately. Broken spot in a
 >   KM> trace, loose wire up inside a port... who knows....
 > Right: plus bad solder joint - could be literally anything anywhere.
 > Opening the case to look for anything obvious is probably as far as I'd
 > go: not going to look at the board with a magnifying glass - probably
 > one the sandwiched type and the problem is in a middle layer!
 KM> With the Asus P5B-Deluxe board (like mine where USB quit and
 KM> voltage measured by the board was low) ... turns out it's a
 KM> design problem with the southbridge wiring. Evidently it slowly
 KM> cooks the relevant capacitors, and eventually, USB fails, tho the
 KM> rest of the board keeps working.
 
Oh goodie!  ASUSTek here, so the same company.  (Some do sound similar 
so checked.)  OTTOMH I don't know what Northbridge and Southbridge do --
one of those Black Box things.

  In Northbridge/Southbridge chipset architecture designs, the Southbridge
  is the chip that controls all of the computers I/O functions, such as
  USB, audio, serial, the system BIOS, the ISA bus, the interrupt
  controller and the IDE channels. In other words, all of the functions of
  a processor except memory, PCI and AGP.

By that sounds like if the Southbridge goes one just has a bunch of parts
on a big printed circuit board.  Any suggestions as to what to watch 
for/starts to occur when the thing starts to fail?  


And as a FWIW I did finally replace the 'AMD-approved' heat sink and fan
assembly with a Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO; CPU now running a lot 
cooler.  Highest I've seen (per PSensor) is 112, maybe 118øF (44-48øC) 
-- old heat sink and fan would get up to 180ø ==> could use the CD/DVD 
tray to hold my mug and the CPU to warm up the water for my coffee and
tea!  The 'USB sensitivity' is less but then it's May and the humidity 
is more and seems that has always helped the problem.



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