I recently bought a Core P3 - love the case. Was using the PCI-E riser (newer black clip version) and noticed that performance was much lower than it was when the card was seated directly in the PCI-E slot. I had the riser plugged in to slot 3, so I disconnected the power and swapped the riser to slot 1. The computer turned on, made a crackling noise then shut off and wouldn't turn on. I assumed I'd not plugged it in correctly and this shorted something and killed my motherboard. So I received a replacement motherboard yesterday and set it up again. Was getting video glitches, could only run windows in safe mode, sometimes the system wouldn't post and the VGA light stay lit up on the motherboard indicating something wrong with the graphics card connection. Then later last night while the system was powered on and had hung again trying to load Windows the new motherboard made a loud popping sound. So that's a second dead motherboard. I had originally thought the shorts might have been caused by the RGB lights and splitters I have been setting up, but after reading this thread I'm now think (though can't be certain) it's the PCI-E riser cable that's shorting somewhere and has killed the two motherboards. I'll get in touch with support and hopefully can sort out getting one of the premium riser cables or something...
