Dead m/board - who's with me?

[Mini-Me]

Hi.

My media-player PC died last night.
It consists of an older Socket-462 board and Sempron 2200 CPU.

Essentially, the box will no longer boot, post, or beep.

I read the thread for no beep no post, to make sure I have covered the basics, but it revealed nothing.

Proceedure:

- Removed hard-drives, reboot looking for POST - negative
- Replaced PSU with new 300W one - negative
- Replaced RAM with good stick from another machine - negative
- Removed graphics card and replaced with another - negative

At this point, the only thing I want to try, is replacement of the CPU, but I currently don't have any old 462 CPU's spare, so not sure if this will happen.

I think the motherboard is dead.

The last time I was able to boot it(day before yesterday), the sound was very very crackly, which is very unusal.

Also, the screen has displayed wierd things before today too, and the mouse has been frequently freezing on me.

Comments welcome at this stage, in case I am on the wrong track, but at this stage, I am preping myself to swap the motherboard...

[mjc]

Eyeball the capacitors on the motherboard. Yes, there was a time a couple of years ago where there were a lot of the 'bad' ones that made it on to motherboards...but that doesn't mean that caps can't go bad now.

The 'crackley' sound is what makes me think of bad caps...

[Mini-Me]

Good point.
:)
I will check this out - thanks.

[Mini-Me]

Not sure if this is of any interest, but as I started this thread, I figured you guys might like to know what happened...

I got the board going again, with a 3rd AGP card.
It would seem that the 2nd one I tried was also crook - it was from my spares, but I have now binned that one too, as it is unreliable/suspect.

When I fired the machine up with no AGP card at all, I get POST beeps that the machine cannot find any graphics card, so I thought this is a good sign(whereas with either the "Dead" card or the "Spare" card in, I get nothing at all), so I purchased a brand-new AGP card and plonked that in there, and it is running again.

I know, I know - why didn't I do that as one of the 1st steps?
...i'm not sure, really, I just didn't do it, I went straight to the spare card.

Obviously, the "Spare" AGP card was also dead/suspect, and it was just unlucky for me, that the 2nd one I tried happened to be faulty also.
:(

Anyhow, this problem now seems to be cured, however, I am curious as to why the 1st card would just die suddenly like that, unless it essentially cooked itself to death from overheating...

I have a spare VGA cooling-kit, so might install this on the new card, to ensure that the GPU does not overheat on this card.(both the old card and the new one I just bought are passively-cooled.)

The old card was a GeCube ATi Radeon 9550 with passive cooling, and the new card is an nVIDIA GeForce 5200 with passive cooling.

Thoughts?

[mjc]

The old eyeball test on the caps on the card would be a good idea...

Yeah, heat can kill them like that. I'd be tempted to put that card cooler to use...