Dead motherboard? No video or POST beeps on power on

nsafreak

Diamond Member
Oct 16, 2001
7,093
3
81
I guess I'm just looking for confirmation more than anything else to make sure that I didn't miss trying to do something that I should have done. I was putting together some spare parts that I had sitting in storage for a little MAME box. Unfortunately it seems that either the CPU or motherboard (or both?) are toast. I power the system on, the fans start spinning and the hard disk & DVD drive start spinning up but no video ever gets sent to the monitor and I get no POST code beeps.

Here are the system specs:

P4 3.2GHz CPU
MSI PM8M-V Socket 478 motherboard
512MB DDR-400 RAM
Radeon 9600XT Video Card
ATi TV Tuner card
Hercules Fortissimo II
WD 40GB HDD
Antec 450 watt PSU

Here's what I've tried so far:

1) Reset the BIOS - No change
2) Removed all addon cards and used the built in video - No change
3) Removed the hard drive and DVD drive - No change
4) Removed one stick at a time of the RAM and tried just one in either slot - No change
5) Removed all RAM (just to try and get SOME kind of beep code) - No change (and no beep code :mad: )
6) Reseated the CPU and made sure there was adequate thermal paste between it and the heatsink (one pea sized drop that was spread) - No change

So is there something blindingly obvious that I forgot to check or do I just have a dead motherboard on my hands?
 

nsafreak

Diamond Member
Oct 16, 2001
7,093
3
81
PSU is fine. Did the paperclip test before I even hooked it up to the system to make sure that it was good (at least to the point that it would power on).