PC won't start. Any ideas to get it working?

[Harrison]

Re: PC won't start. Any ideas to get it working?

It's only going to cost pence to find out if it is a blown capacitor; it's not like you would lose more than you stand to gain if it fixes the problem.

Go for it.

Good point. I just need to wait for my new soldering iron to arrive. Should be this week.

BTW, I know next to nothing about electronics. I did do A-Level Physics years ago, but the electronics aspect was completely theory and equation based, so I don't have any real practical experience with electronics at all other than making up cables and soldering a few wires for modchips etc. How to I work out what replacement capacitor I need? And can you buy them singularly?

I do have a couple of dead graphics cards and other things to practice on though, because attempting something for real.

 

[Merlin]

Re: PC won't start. Any ideas to get it working?

"...Paging Dr. Zetr0, Dr. Zetr0 to surgery, please............."

 

[Harrison]

Re: PC won't start. Any ideas to get it working?

I will take a picture of the motherboard and try and find a schematic of it, which hopefully will help.

It would be cool to get this board working again, and for me to do it myself, as it would feel like a real achievement. I do however have the feeling I'm going to need lots of advice from the big Z.

 

[rkauer]

Re: PC won't start. Any ideas to get it working?

When I see a blown over capacitor on a peecee mobo, I always swap the voltage regulator near it.

A good tip for ya, H. :wink:

 

[Harrison]

Re: PC won't start. Any ideas to get it working?

I'm pleased to say that I've resurrected the older computer now. And it is being put into service as a replacement Emulation system, taking over from an Athlon XP 3000+ system I have been used for the last 3 years.

I ended up buying a replacement motherboard. I could only find one motherboard still being made for 939 socket Athlon 64's, so I had to go with that. It is an ASRock MoBo (which I normally avoid building systems around due to their budget nature), but they seem to have progressed in the last couple of years. I had to repair a dead system for a friend early last year, and his was still running an Athlon XP, and again at that time only an ASRock board was available, but I was quite impressed with it for the money. And ASRock are a branch of Asus, so they should in reality be quite good. What you don't get with them is as much detail in their manuals compared to Asus boards, but for anyone who builds computers that isn't a problem.

And again this new ASRock board is pretty good for the money. It is smaller than a standard ATX size, measuring 9.6" by 8.6", so actually a bit smaller than the standard microATX standard, and therefore quite a bit smaller than the dead Asus board it replaces. This is mainly due to it only having a single PCI-E slot compared to the old board having 2, and only having one PCI-E x1 slot and 2 PCI slots. But it still has quite a few nice features.

The actual model is ASRock 939N68PV-GLAN. And it actually beats the old Asus A8N-SLI Premium board I was using before in a number of areas. It seems to have better overclocking potential with nicer settings in the BIOS, and it can also run 4 ram modules at 400MHz, whereas the Asus board would drop to 333MHz if 4 were installed. It also has 4 USB2 headers on the motherboard, so an extra 8 USB ports can be added to backplates, case front panels, or hooked up to a card reader, which is very useful; making a total of up to 12 ports if needed (the old Asus board only supported 10). It also has better on board audio, using Digital HD audio, compared to the old board having the older not so good Realtek AC97 standard.

Where it isn't so good is in other on board connectors. It only has a single Lan gigabit port, but then I didn't really need the extra one on the old board. It only has 4 SATA ports, compared to 8 on the old board. This is a bit of a limitation as I wanted to move over to using an SATA DVD-RW, but I wouldn't then have any SATA ports free. And it only has a single IDE port, so only 2 PATA devices can be connected. At the moment I have 2 DVD-RW's attached to this, so I can't attach any older IDE HDDs if needed.

The layout of the new board is a little unusual, but I found it quite a good layout. Having the floppy drive connector on the bottom edge towards the left was a little odd, and the 24 pin motherboard power connector is located to the left of the CPU, which is a bit odd compared to ASUS boards which are always on the right edge in a perfect location away from the CPU, any rear case fans, and out of the way of the air flow of the PSU. But I got around that with some cable ties.

So the current setup of the rebuilt system is:

Athlon 64 3700+ (overclocked to 2.4GHz)
Arctic Freezer 64 Pro Cooler
ASRock 939N68PV-GLAN motherboard
3GB DDR3200 Ram
PNY 7800GT 256MB Graphics card
120GB Maxtor SATA HDD (boot drive)
2x 1TB Samsung F1 SATA2 HDDs
2x PATA DVD-RWs
500W Thermaltake PSU
Thermaltake Soprano Case
Windows XP SP3

I decided to stick with WinXP SP3 (32bit) for this system as my main system is now running Vista SP1 (64bit), so it is a useful second system for any software, games and emulators that I can't get to run on the 64bit OS, or Vista.

You might have noticed the Arctic Freezer cooler. I was so impressed with the Intel version I used with my new system build that I bought the Athlon 64 version to use in this rebuild, and so far it has reduced the CPU temperature by 7 degrees on average compared to the standard Athlon 64 cooler, and it is much quieter.

I'm still going to try and repair and get the older Asus motherboard working again as I have a spare Athlon 64 waiting in the wings for it. Hopefully it is just the cap I noticed was blown on the board. If I can I'm not actually sure what I would use it for. Maybe build a test server with it.

 

[Merlin]

Re: PC won't start. Any ideas to get it working?

There's nothing wrong with AsRock boards, H.

I used to be an Abit fanboy until a particularly nasty experience with an Abit KV7M-RAID board (Kinnie has had the same pain with the same board). No matter what I tried, it just sat there with the warning siren going off and no boot. I took it back Aria in Manchester and they tried their CPU, memory and graphics card on my board and it booted; tried mine and nothing. They tried my parts on their identical test board and it booted! We tried all combinations and at the end, there was just no explaining it, as the CPU, memory and Graphics cards were the same brands and were more or less identical; it was just a badly designed board IMO. In the end I got a K7S8X AsRock board instead and that was absolutely rock solid with a Athlon 2400+ in it.

My current machine has an AsRock 775 Dual-VSTA board in it, with a 3.2Ghz Celeron D, 2Gb DDR2 667 Corsair memory and an Nvidia 7300GT 512Mb graphics card. Not exactly cutting edge, but as reliable as a toaster running under XP.

 

[Harrison]

Re: PC won't start. Any ideas to get it working?

ASRock didn't used to be that great when they first appeared on the scene in about 2002. The boards were budget end of the market and limited in features. But as I mentioned above, they have come a long way, and are now making good quality middle of the road motherboards. Still not on par with Asus and the other big boys for features. But like you say, they seem to be very reliable boards that just work and don't require loads of bios tweaks and updates like higher end enthusiast boards often do.

About the only thing I did notice is that the same CPU was running about 8 degrees hotter on this ASRock board with the same heatsink, compared to when it was in the old Asus board. But with the new heatsink installed it is now about 1-2 degrees lower.

It also seems really stable so far.

 

[rkauer]

Re: PC won't start. Any ideas to get it working?

Asrock is the second line of products of ASUS, BTW.

 

[Harrison]

Re: PC won't start. Any ideas to get it working?

Yeah I knew RSRock are a subsidiary of Asustek. However they are a separate entity in many respects, and a lot of their stuff is made in China, whereas Asus now source a lot of their motherboard components from Japan.