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InterviewSolution
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Solve : Is it the motherboard?? |
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Answer» When I turn on the 'puter, the fan, then the DVD, then the HDs go on, including the lights on the HDs. However, the monitor says "no signal". The HDs spin, but don't make the usual noises of the system loading. The puter has worked fine for 5 years, then I moved it around (physically), reconnected the peripherals, and it behaved as described. I *think* it's the motherboard, but would love to have some confirmation before I go ahead and replace it. Thank you! "No Signal" typically indicates a problem somewhere between the display and the display adapter. Check to make sure the card is seated firmly and the cables are tightly connected.I removed and replaced the video cable, with the connectors looking fine. Ditto for the video card. I also replaced the card with a borrowed one known to work. Still "no signal". Please note: when I turn on the machine, the red and green lights by the main switch don't go on, and the HDs spin, but don't sound like they go through the routine of a system that boots. CPU: Barton Xp2500 overclocked to 180MHz I had the Athlon XP 2800+ 2.08Ghz and I killed mine with an overclock when the thermal compound dried up. These Athlon XP's if driven too hard have no thermal fail safe and so they will basically roast and burn.... as mine did. My Athlon XP 2800+ had a bubble in the waffer where it roasted and let out its magic smoke. Given the age of this computer, the fact that this CPU line was known for cooking to death if not cooled properly..... your best bet would be to try to find a cheap Athlon XP replacement CPU on ebay for like $8 or so and swap it out, also clear the BIOS settings so that the system will want to boot at normal clock without overclock conditions. You might be able to save this system by a CPU swap if you roasted it like I did. With my system, I had a Athlon XP 1800+ that my brother upgraded away from in favor of the Athlon XP 3200+ for gaming which was way better, and installed that into my motherboard, BUT.... while this CPU fixed a completely dead system and now it would boot and function and surprisingly it didnt break the Windows XP Home activation with a CPU swap, for some reason the AGP BUS was still acting up causing video card issues even when swapping PSU and Video Cards, and I figured that when the CPU roasted something with the AGP BUS was messed up in the process. The system would only behave on the integrated weak VIA GPU, so I pretty much yanked the CPU, RAM, Cards, and Jumpers and threw away the motherboard. Due to the Athlon XP melt downs when not well cooled, AMD eventually implemented a thermal safety design like INTEL in which the CPU will try to protect itself. INTEL came out with Thermal Throttling to avoid melt downs in which the CPU's with this protection could run without a heatsink connected to them and they would just get very laggy as the clock is crippled in speed to try to avoid melt down. Dug this up that I read a while back..... http://books.google.com/books?id=4wEAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA28&lpg=PA28&dq=athlon+xp+melt+down+without+cooling&source=bl&ots=wgXEFiIYGH&sig=WKs9Z2SaI_01KAG02vxY-YHT2E0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-mBNVOOeMpTroAS4poKQBA&ved=0CBsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=athlon%20xp%20melt%20down%20without%20cooling&f=false Decided to look up a CPU for you and I missed my ability to add this to last post. This CPU would put you where your XP 2500+ was for performance without overclocking. And its a cheap try at fixing the issue. http://www.ebay.com/itm/AMD-ATHLON-XP-2800-SOCKET-462-CPU-AXDA2800DKV4D-BARTON-CORE-333-MHz-SYSTEM-BUS-/111490284428?pt=CPUs&hash=item19f556bb8c Also get some new thermal compound to apply a drop to the top of the CPU if you chose to go this path. * I am assuming you already reseated the RAM, removed all cards and tried to boot with bare minimum without success, and this is a last try at saving that motherboard since you already swapped out the PSU, and this is under the assumption that the CPU could have cooked to death after being moved and bond between heatsink and CPU with dry thermal compound lead to CPU melt down. And very last..... check capacitors around the CPU to see if any are swollen or leaking crusty electrolyte. The Capacitor Plague hit I believe after this motherboard was made, and so it should have healthy capacitors, but I find bad capacitors swollen going back to Pentium III era motherboards. More info here on bad capacitors ... http://www.badcaps.net/pages.php?vid=2Just what the doctor ordered, thank you! I started looking around, and found this: http://www.ebay.com/sch/Computers-Tablets-Networking-/58058/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=amd+athlon+xp3200&_sop=15 If it looks like it would work, for the small $$ difference I would try that one. Any thoughts?Only concern with the XP3200+ is that its a 400Mhz FSB CPU and your system is on 333mhz FSB, and so you would need your multiplier to hit 14x to match up to it or if your motherboard supported 400Mhz DDR memory switch to 400Mhz BUS. I havent found any info on your motherboard yet to see what CPUs are supported, but generally sticking with a 333Mhz FSB CPU you should be able to boot the system if its just that your prior CPU cooked and didnt take out the motherboard in the process. If you are able to locate info that suggests that the XP3200+ is supported then it may be worth a try, but if the XP3200+ doesnt play well at 333Mhz which is normally a 400Mhz FSB CPU, you may end up with the same symptoms you have now with no boot and black screen. So my suggestion would be that if you are not positive with the motherboards CPU support, I would go with a chip that is RATED for a 333 FSB vs a 400 FSB. The XP 3000+ has a 333Mhz FSB which i think is the FASTEST 333Mhz FSB CPU for socket 462. My brother was able to go with the Athlon XP 3200+ upgrade from the Athlon XP 1800+ because his motherboard was spec'd at 266/333/400 FSB support. * On my system to over clock it way back 7 years ago when i cooked it, i installed 400mhz DDR RAM, and then overclocked the 333Mhz FSB to boost the clock since the multiplier for the single core was locked on my Athlon XP2800+. And by using 400mhz DDR RAM, it was still underclocked on the overclocked 333 FSB so no memory issues such as what could happen if pushing memory that is specifically 333Mhz above spec clock. I also didnt have to adjust any voltages, it was purely just a FSB increase to gain the overclock. Also when I installed the Athlon XP 1800+ into my system to get it back up and running I had to install 2 x 256MB 266Mhz FSB sticks into my system to match up with the FSB. I also got these from my brother since he didnt need the slower RAM sticks anymore and I gave him my 400Mhz DDR sticks in trade of the slower good CPU and RAM, and he ended up using my sticks to boost his RAM to 2GB at 4 x 512MB sticks. In the end, since i had the AGP port issue, i ended up throwing the motherboard away, and installed a cheap $75 barebone AM2+ CPU/Motherboard combo off of newegg that came with a Sempron x2 2200 as seen here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138178 I also had to get a PCI Express video card which I ended up getting a used one cheaply Geforce 7600GT as well as I had 1.5GB of DDR2 667Mhz RAM that I was able to install from 2 dead computer donors to get a new system that could game. This dual-core sempron was actually not a bad CPU, and I ran that up until my friend at work cooked his HP's integrated GPU playing wow and killed the motherboard and when I helped him swap the motherboards he decided to go all out and get the Phenom II x6 vs the Athlon II x4 620 2.6ghz that the HP originally had. he gave me this quadcore for free when i asked if he was interested in selling it for like $50. He said here have the CPU in trade for helping me get my computer back up and running with faster CPU and new motherboard. The cool thing was that the Athlon II x4 620 2600Mhz CPU was a match for this cheap motherboard and so I was able to leap from a weak dual-core into a decent quad core for processing power. This motherboard has since been downgraded to a Athlon x2 4450B overclocked to 2.53ghz and the quadcore was moved to a newer Socket AM3+ motherboard to hopefully someday have a AMD fx-8350 8 core installed when i have some money to burn as seen here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113284 The A7N8X has a 333MHz bus, but in the A7N8X-E, the one I have, the bus is 400MHz. So I should be in good shape, and I think I'll go ahead and get an XP3200+, and see what happens. Then if it works, I'll look into the memory, as I want to get a third stick anyway. I enjoyed very much your input, and it bridged for me a long hyatus in my interaction with computers. I had not put my hands inside one for a number of years, long enough that when this one crashed I had to dig inside my head for the neurons that remembered about it. It's slowly coming back, including the fun of putting machines together. The first computer I was able to put my hands on, way back, was an IBM650 running vacuum tubes (one dual triode flip-flop per *bit*) and had a 64k words rotating drum for memory. It understood only machine language, so you had to write a program with ones and zeroes, punch it into 80 column cards, put the stack in the hopper, then cross your fingers, and for special occasions also your toes, and see what would happen. And anyone getting close to a stack of cards with a cup of coffee would automatically be shot on sight. The fastest operation, which if I remember correctly was a one digit displacement in of the shift register, took a lightning fast 2 ms (yes, milliseconds). To write a really fast program you would add up the time of all the steps of a sentence, then add an appropriate small delay so at the beginning of the next sentence the mag head would fall on the first free location of the memory drum. I suppose that was the precursor of interleafing. The first symbolic assembler for the 650 appeared when I was in my senior year, but it did not work. So getting it to work was offered as a graduate special project in computer science. A few suckers took it up, but it never got to work. Quite a bit later ALGOL60 (stands for "Algorhitmic Language) appeared, running on the solid state Burroughs B5000, that had its own compiler ("Daddy, what's a compiler?"), and it was like going to Heaven after having been sinking deeper and deeper in Purgatory coding machine language. That's when it really became fun, and I really got into it. By then, one cutting edge was connecting to the machine remotely through the telephone with an acoustic modem (at 160 bauds). And the most popular topic of discussion was whether it would ever be feasible to time share the computer to different modems. The main argument against was that, somehow, the laws of entropy would shut things down as the number of connections would increase to perhaps a dozen or so. A kind of digital equivalent to the uncrossable Sound WALL. And linking together even two computers was a pipe dream, that only very disturbed people ("one of those") would seriously think about. My general orientation was "If we can think it, we can do it." But before too long I turned away from the whole thing anyway, because in my quite incorrect perception the computer crowd was getting more and more introverted, seeming to do it as an end in itself. Actually I was quite wrong, and they were way ahead. In retrospect they had, already back then, powerful IDEAS of what computers could do in the world, and worked very hard at figuring out how to make it happen. The "computers will take over the world (and more importantly make your job obsolete)" syndrome appeared as a reaction to that. And it was made worse by a cartoon, very widely publicized by IBM, of their 132 columns printer with each line of output reading "THINK." Burroughs, who was much more "reasonable," fought that back with a similar cartoon of their own printer that would say "Think H ell, COMPUTE!" I got back into using computers some years later, when Basic became "the thing," because I needed it in my work (electrical engineer). That was mucho fun, like getting back together with an old friend... Eventually I decided to build my first machine (I never *bought* one, and I'm prod of it! ), which was a top of the line lightning fast 386 running DOS. Now how did I get into all this? It seems that the more I write the more stuff keeps coming back... so I think I'll stop here while I'm ahead. Thanks gandalf1935 for that neat look back into past computer technology which founded todays computers. I have read lots of books on the early computers, and so someone who worked on them who is willing to share real life experiences on them, gets my attention. Hoping this CPU fixes your system... And thank you for all your good input. I'm keeping my finger crossed, and will let you know. |
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