My motherboard ate my processor. but why?

recently bought a used Soyo KT333 Dragon Elite Motherboard to replace an old Abit that went bad. when i installed the new board and powered it on, i got a beep code that went something like short, long, long, long and no post. the system then powered down and i could smell something burning. i took the fan off and noticed a black hole in my once perfect amd 2700+. did i get buy a bad motherboard? what causes a di to cook like that?

background: board was installed fine (ie, no grounding to the case). system was booted with bare essentials (ie, cpu/mobo, video, ram).

system specs:
soyo kt333 dragon elite
amd 2700+
1gig corsair value select
ati 9800se agp
antec true power 430w psu

thanks to anyone who has some feedback!

If it happened during post the mobo wouldnt have turned it off yet because the early athlons didnt have built in thermosensors I think. When you replaced this did you use thermal gel on the HSF? Did you perhaps use too much on a conductive gel and fry it? Theres actually quite a bit that could do this, just bad luck. But hey, at least you get to upgrade a cpu now, that’s always nice.

barthon and duron series are known as charcoal :smiley: yeah this is true as they are heated too much and don’t have a thermal sensor on them

the cpu might be burned because of your mobo is not supporting your cpu

kt333 chipsets as i remember max. support 2500+ or 2400+

and if an unknown brand shall be giving more support with newer bios i don’t know

i suggest you to save some money and buy a new system

choosing the mobo have a gpu integrated one so you can spend the remaining money on the other parts, after all, if there’s any left, you will buy a gfx

My guess is that no thermal paste was cleaned off and reapplied and/or the heatsink wasn’t secured or installed. That’s pretty much fatal for a Socket A chip.