Need Advice Board Repair.

[slim_radio]

Intro- My girlfriends dad owned a PC store that closed and I was going through some old hardware and decided to slap together a PC from the spare parts. I found some DDR2, a SATA 250GB drive, a P4M900-M4 motherboard , A 350W PSU, and a handful of Pentium 4/celeron processors.

Problems Begin-
I put everything together and decided to try and give it a boot to see if I would get anything on screen. The fan moved a hair then stopped. Further inspection showed that the board had 4 bad Capacitors on it.

- I replaced the capacitors following and online tutorial I have a lot of soldering experience but never on something so small and fragile. When complete there were no burn points on the board and the soldering joints were very tidy.

- I reconnected the board and tried to boot again. The same thing occurred the fan jerked for a second then stopped.

Additional info-
-I tried switching ram.
-I tried a different PSU
-I tried a different PCU.
-When I disconnect the black/yellow power cable from the board the cd drive, hard drive, and CPU fan all run.
- My graphics card started smoking when I booted with the black and yellow cable disconnected.

If anyone can determine what may be wrong or has had similar problems please give advice. This has been a long and fun project I would love to see it through without sinking any money into it.

 

[johnb35]

I would say permanent motherboard damage. You have to have the 4 pin cpu power connector attached in order for the board to work correctly. Also check to make sure you have a good power supply. What graphics card are you using?

 

[S3P3HR]

I know motherboard stays on without ram installed ( cpu fan will work if connected to motherboard ) just an alarm for not installing the ram . and not installing graphics will not shut down motherboard either . Not sure about cpu but I think I ran a motherboard without cpu once . when you say the fan moved then stopped it may show that cpu cooling is not installed correctly because most motherboards automatically shut down themselves when their cpu reaches about 95 degrees and when you turn on a system with badly installed cooling it will take about 10 sec in my experience to reach to its limit and mobo shuts down . when you retry because cpu is still hot it may took less than 3 sec to shut down .

- Disconnect Graphics and ram and recheck CPU cooling installation . If mobo stays on most likely it is not the power or mobo .
- If stayed on turn off and reinstall ram and graphics and turn on .
- If stayed on first go in bios and check cpu temp .