power surge kills computer?

[SemperFi]

We had a bad storm last week and my buddie's power went off. He was home when they got the power working they reset the pole breaker which just happened to be right outside his house. He said it made a crack like a small bomb. He went inside to fire up his computer and nothing. A local computer shop said it isn't worth fixing since it was a dell and they have proprietary motherboard or something like that. Anyhow he has a new one ordered and asked me if I wanted his old one. Of course I said sure.

Well I would like to see if I can get it to work again instead of keeping parts.

Here is what I have tried so far.
I plugged it in untouched and the led on the power button is on. When I press the power button the ps fan and case fan fire up that is it. no beep nothing. Holding the power button for more than 4 seconds shuts it off. So then I removed all add on cards including the video card, same result. I then swap out a power supply I am running an athlon with and having the same result. Last I pulled the memory and still don't get any beeps.

I am inclined to say the motherboard is shot. What do you think?
Do you think the cpu and ram are ok?
I hate to buy a board and find out the processor and ram are bad. Especially since it is a P4. I only have Athlons around here to trade parts with.

Any advice is appreciated.

Semper Fi

Edit/ anyone know if the case is special. Will any other motherboard bolt in here. I see the ribbon connector from all the front of case buttons and led's I am sure I can figure a way around that.

 

[redbeard1]

You might check this older article out. I think dell stuff is still proprietary, though I don't know for sure.

Info

 

[SemperFi]

All right this is mighty weird. I just pulled the heatsink off so I could see what socket this board was and look for a possible replacement. When I pulled off the heatsink the processor came out with it. I have no experience with intel but the Amd processors don't do this. Is this common with intel chip? All of the pins are very short compared to my athlon but were uniform in length.

Any suggestions on how to seperate this from the heatsink? Yea I know very carefully.

Edit/ Redbeard1 I read that is very interesting. If that MB is still like that I am glad it is apparently bad or I would have roasted my power supply in my working system. You know that would have made my day.

Tomorrow I plan on trying to reseat the cpu into the socket and see if it will clamp it in.

 

[TheCorm]

I have found that several system manufacturers, particularly those who use Intel processors use some sort of gunk...thermanl bonding...I dunno and they virtually glue the processor to the heatsink, perhaps to make it more difficult for people to upgrade so they will go back to them and pay stupid money for the upgrade.

If you do wanna try and seperate I would suggest something like a thin flexible and blunted bread/putty knife type thing but it might be too difficult, I remember trying to get a Panrix PII400 off it's heatsink, couldn't manage it!...was worried I would crack something.

Does it look like a standard ATX PSU?....that is often the bit that is properietry with dell I believe, whats the connector like, does it have more than one connector going to the board? And the board...does it looks MicroATX format, what sort of size is it and how many screws are holding it in? Could you possibly get some pics?

I have found that Surges can take out almost any component in the system but the motherboard is most sensitive. I had one strange instance where a surge took out the power supply but somehow also took out the graphics card, I was quite happy that somehow it had protected the motherboard by shorting itself out I think, I replaced the PSU for free (generic 300W) and sold them a new graphics card and 3 surge strips!

Jamie

 

[SemperFi]

The heatsink has some of that stuff that looks like a thermal pad that comes on most of the heatsink units that I have bought in the past. Except this one is green instead of white.

The power supply looks like atx and the one out of my other system had the same effect it would make the fans turn on and off so I am guessing by saying it probobly is regular atx. The ps in it did have an extra connector that has 4 wires and connects toward the agp connector. The board is atx sized maybe a little bigger. Definately not micro atx. I could get some pics later tonight.

Thanks corm

 

[Bug]

Think that 4-pin connector could be the 12V for Pentium 4's.

 

[WarCon]

Was he plugged into a surge protector or UPS? If he was, he should be sending for his warranty replacement from the company (you will get a inspector most likely, so its probably best not to mess to much).

If he wasn't plugged into a surge protector or UPS then he should of been....

It is pretty common for the thermal pad they put on retail heatsinks to pull the processor out of the socket (I think the clamping pressure in those little sockets is too low myself), I have even had it happen with AS3, until I learned to tilt my heatsink to the side a bit before pulling it up.

There is also a good chance that alot of the components in that computer will fail shortly, a customer got zapped through his modem from a lightning strike and the immediate losers were the modem, and the DVD player (go figure). A week later the hard drive suddenly started to get lots of bad sectors (checked on different system) and the memory failed. I refuse to put the motherboard and processor into anything, just to see them fail a month down the road.

Anyway good luck with whatever you decide to do.

 

[SemperFi]

I highly recommended buying a surge protector to him when he bought it about 9 months ago but I guess he is regretting it now. He showed me the $49 surge protector he just bought yesterday. I told him to go to home depot and get one of the $18 ups on clearance. one of our locals still has a bunch of them. I doubt if he does that though.

warcon,
That is interesting about the other componets failing. I hadn't considered that. I know at work about a year ago the telephone system got hit and this one computer lost a modem but everything else is still chuging along. I don't know what I am going to do since I am an amd man I really don't want to spend any money on an intel especially if other stuff could start failing. I thought I might keep an eye on newegg refurbs for a cheapie board but I will have to keep what you say in mind.

Thanks

 

[WarCon]

I had to get a UPS, I was afraid the frequent brown outs we get in summer from storms and overusing power for air-conditioning was gonna cause my powersupply to create surges that would slowly degrade my components. Or just the head crashing from sudden powerloss during hard drive use was gonna kill my hard drives. I spent alot on my computer, I figured I could spend ~$100 on a good UPS to protect it. I didn't hear about that Home Depot deal, I may have to check that out and see, a spare UPS wouldn't be a bad idea.

I also use a really nice surge protector when I work on people equip. I figure thats my insurance policy if get struck by a surge in the line or lightning.