One of my older boxes just up and died on me the other day. It's been serving as a HTPC for a year or two since I retired it and bought the rig in my signature. A few weeks ago it started showing the occasional quirk, freezing/crashing every couple days or so, nothing unusual for previously overclocked retired parts. Now I can't get it to turn on at all; based on some indicator LED on the mobo I know it's getting power, and if I unplug/re-plug the PSU cable I can get the fans to spin for a second when I hit the power button. I pulled the RAM to no effect, tested the PSU with a paper clip, and even eliminated the power button by using the mobo's on board switch. I have a fair bit of experience with troubleshooting these sorts of problems, and it's pretty clear to me that the problem is either the CPU or the motherboard (probably the CPU). I just want to get some input from others to try and clear up which one is the culprit. here are the rough system specs, ask if you need any more details: Intel core 2 quad Q6600 (G0 stepping, OC'd to 3.2Ghz for years, running @ stock since it's retirement) ASUS P5Q-E socket 775 mobo, 4 gigs crucial DDR2 AMD radeon card, no idea what model, cheap and fairly new. old Enermax 585W PSU. This has been running fine for ~7 years straight, doubt it would quit now. The system hasn't exactly been well cooled since it started HTPC duty, but it's workload has been pretty light. IIRC the CPU temps dance around 50*c during daily use. I don't have a spare CPU or mother board to test with, but I can pick up a 775-pin Pentium D for cheap if I think it's appropriate. I would like to squeeze a few more years out of the motherboard if it's still alive, but I don't want to buy an out dated CPU only to find out the motherboard is dead, so if anyone can help me be sure of what part died I'd really appreciate it.
I had a psu go on me recently and it passed the paper clip test. I'd try swapping out the psu and see if it will post first.
Thanks for the input, I have always been a bit leery about using a paper clip to decide whether or not a complex electrical device was working correctly or not. I'll test the system with a spare PSU when I get back from work and see what happens.
Well, there you have it. I was prepared to go buy a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM if it came to it, and all I had to do was swap in a spare power supply. I genuinely didn't expect that PSU to fail on me, but I'm glad you pushed me to test it properly. Now I just hope the PSU I put in holds up, I have no memory of when/where/how I obtained it, and there's no total wattage rating listed anywhere on it :/
