Motherboard fail?

mr.doom

mr.doom

Member
Hi guys and gals.

It's been heck of a long time since I've been here, work and all. Some of you might remember my White Dragon build.

Well, after few months of problem free usage, the computer died yesterday. When I say it died, I mean that when I came back from work it was off. Any attempt to start it up, was met with immediate restarts, before even it reached the POST stage. I had a problem like that with one of my computers before - the motherboard was shorting with the case. I disassembled everything (there were no leaks at all, at least from what I've seen), and assembled outside of the case, with new tubing and all. Problem persisted. I tried all RAM configurations in all slots, both with just one and two sticks or no sticks at all. No luck. GPU was disconnected from power, as only 24-pin was connected to the motherboard. I bypassed the motherboard altogether, by starting the PSU with the paper clip, and voila, it works.

Now for the question, that I may know the answer already: is the motherboard dead? Or could it be the CPU?

Thanks for the answer, I want to make sure before I spend any money.
 
Hard to tell, could be the board/power supply/video card. The paper clip test does nothing other then tell if its not completely dead. Still could have a rail drop to really low and it would still fire up using a paper clip. My guess is one of the above. Got another computer you could swap things out in to narrow it down?
 
StrangleHold said:
Hard to tell, could be the board/power supply/video card. The paper clip test does nothing other then tell if its not completely dead. Still could have a rail drop to really low and it would still fire up using a paper clip. My guess is one of the above. Got another computer you could swap things out in to narrow it down?
Click to expand...

Sadly not... I don't know if that makes any difference, but couple of times it started up to the point I could see that "The overclock have failed" and to enter Setup, but I never had enough time to actually revert to safe settings before it either turned off or restarted.
 
Update:

I stripped all. No ram (doesn't work); no GPU (doesn't work); No CPU block attached (doesn't work); no CPU (doesn't work). Plainly, if only attached the power to the motherboard, then it is not working.

If I do the paper clip test, everything works, the fans are spinning, as long as I do not connect the power through the motherboard. Any thoughts?
 
Unplug it. Press the power button a few times to discharge it. Reset the bios by the jumper or take the battery out for a few minutes. Move the jumper back off clear or put the battery back in. Plug it up and see if it fires up.
 
StrangleHold said:
Unplug it. Press the power button a few times to discharge it. Reset the bios by the jumper or take the battery out for a few minutes. Move the jumper back off clear or put the battery back in. Plug it up and see if it fires up.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I have done that just now, with battery out for about 10 minutes. It is still the same. The motherboard has a button on the back to clear the CMOS, which I tried before disassembling the pc, but it didn't work either.
 
A little update. I got myself some temporary motherboard in a shape of some crappy, bottom of the range Gigabyte. It still had some troubles, but at some point it just went away.

Then I installed a 310.xx Nvidia driver and all went to hell. As soon as the driver would try to load, system would crush. I wiped the HDD and installed a fresh copy of Win 7, but this time the older 306.xx driver. Run Furmark - runs nicely. Run Intel's Burning test on Maximum, it failed after 6 runs. There is no overclock on anything. Is this normal?

Tomorrow I will try to put my old board back and see if it starts with this driver in. Any thoughts guys?
 
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