Is my motherboard toast? (1 Viewer)

[Mark Giles]

Ok, here's what happened. Everything was working perfect for 2 weeks since I bought everything. I turned my computer off, removed a extra unused NIC card I was going to use for XBOX live(I have onboard LAN also) and turned my computer back on. The Windows startup tune started, so now im in windows. I click IE to browse online then all of a sudden, my speakers makes this pop noise followed by a faint steady hum. I turn off my speakers and notice that my computer was frozen. Couldn't move my mouse or anything. My desktop image is still displayed at this point. So I cold boot and now my moniter wont turn on.

So far I have installed another video card with no luck. Same results with no display.

My power supply seems fine, the lights light up on my drives and even the light on the motherboard is lit.

The fans that are plugged into my motherboard are running.

I have uninstalled all cards and drives except for the video card and memory to see if I get any image(yes, my moniter is plugged in).

I even tried clearing the CMOS jumper.

There are no system beeps from my bios at all.

After I finish writing this, Im gonna try installing a different CPU in the motherboard. But wouldn't I get beeps representing a CPU problem?

Is my 2 week old MB gone? Anything else I can try?

My setup:
AMD XP 2200+
ABit AT7-MAX2 w/onboard Lan
512 DDR PC3200
Geforce 4 Ti 4200 128mb
Creative Labs Live!
Additional NIC card(which I took out)
30 and 60GB Maxter HDD's
CDROM and CDRW
ummmmmm and
Windows XP Pro

 

[Max Leung]

Damn, I was about to suggest clearing the CMOS, until I saw you did that!

Open you case and check for blown capacitors...a recent Slashdot.org article had a report on crappy Abit motherboards that do not use tantalum capacitors (to save a few cents per mobo!), but result in huge failure rates within a year of purchase as the cheap caps leak their contents.

Anyhow, try removing all cards and all drives and see if you can get to the BIOS screen. If that works, add them back in, one by one, until it fails.

 

[Max Leung]

Double Post (man the HTF is slow in the last month)

 

[Mark Giles]

I have uninstalled all cards and drives except for the video card and memory to see if I get any image(yes, my moniter is plugged in).

Yep, tried that...

Im gonna call them(the computer store) when they open in about 1/2 hour. Hopefully they will replace it with no problem. Like I said it's only been 2 weeks. The only thing is, they tested it before they sent it to me and including the benchmarks with the motherboard. Regardless, that doesn't guarantee that it's gonna work two weeks later...

 

[Mark Giles]

One thing that's peculiar(well, I didn't realize) is I when my system froze, I would think that if the motherboard died, the image would have gone away, but it stayed on the screen. When observing this, first I ruled out the MB. Then I thought well since the image is loaded in the video cards memory and the video card is still getting power then it could continue to be displayed until the power is cut. Am I correct?

 

[Brian E]

After I finish writing this, Im gonna try installing a different CPU in the motherboard. But wouldn't I get beeps representing a CPU problem?

Most of the time you'll get beeps, but not always. What you describe sounds most likely like a cpu or mb problem.