This is
why a lot of
ATX motherboard designs
suck. Did you know that plugging in a
PCI card while your ATX based
machine is plugged in can
fry the motherboard? Why?
Simple. Modern
Wake-on-lan setups actually supply the
standby power to the
ethernet card via the PCI slot. Yup! Your
PCI slot has a 5V line active all the time, even when the
power is off.
This has
led to
mommyboard makers putting
LED's on the board to warn you to
unplug it before putting in
cards. This is fine and dandy, but I miss the days of
AT boards, when you could
simply turn off the power and plug in your cards. Since your machine is still plugged in, the machine's frame is
grounded and the chance of damage due to
ESD is reduced.
Of course, designing proper
ATX motherboards shouldn't be that big a deal! Let's keep
PCI slots unpowered when the machine is off. In fact, the only place on the board where there should be
power is the area around the ATX power connector, where the
power switch and
wake-on-lan headers are located.