Replacing Compaq 5333cl motherboard..Refurbished Or New 478 board?

[Zerhyn]

I offered to replace my friends motherboard for her after she got a qoute of about $100 from BestBuy. They had diagnosed the computer to see what was wrong with it and i guess after trying a few video cards out on it, they said it was probably the motherboard. I hope they did more than that anyways.

So after getting the computer i run through all the little tricks i know how to do and nothing works. But after reading a few articles on blown capacitors here on anandtech forums. I started going for that rout. And sure enough there is plenty of corrosion on a few of them and some other wierd looking things(sorry don't know what they are called).

The object is to spend as little money as possible. And i found a site that sells a refurbished motherboard for 35 dollars....which at other places it is like 75 or 80...which is just insane.

But would i be able to buy another brand 478 socket motherboard and put that processor in? But if i did that i would probably have to buy new ram. I am just hoping that the processor is still good.

Thanks for any information. And thanks for all the helpful information out here on the boards.

 

[mchammer]

What brand is the chipset? It would be best to use the same kind so there are minimum hassles transferring over the old installation. You can keep the processor and memory as long as they are the same type.

 

[Zerhyn]

i believe it is an intel chipset. It says

intel
fw82801ba
l142tc27
sl5pn
intel '00
korea

And you mean as in same chipset, the same brand, or exact model?

 

[mchammer]

Same chipset, those markings indicate an Intel ICH2 southbridge, however the chipset could be different. From what you are saying it sounds like an i845, but could be i850, does it have SDRAM (not DDR)?

 

[Zerhyn]

It is PC133 SDRAM.

 

[mchammer]

Ok so that's i845 SDRAM edition (there is also a DDR SDRAM edition that came out later). So any i845 SDRAM board should fit in just fine. The only thing that might be an issue is anything onboard such as onboard sound, that would need a new driver, not a problem. Does the system have a video card or integrated video?

 

[Zerhyn]

It has a 32MB nVidia? GeForce2 MX Graphics Card. The good thing is i have the option to get an integrated video card, because her family doesn't do any type of gaming.

 

[mchammer]

Yea, but a board without integrated graphics might be cheaper, then you can use the old card, which will be better than integrated anyway.

 

[Zerhyn]

True, thanks for all the help. We decided just to try the refurbished, that way it will be cheaper, incase something else in the computor doesn't work.

Again thanks for the help, greatly appreciated.

 

[Zerhyn]

Actually it turns out not all the fans were working. The main chasis fan was not spinning when installed the new motherboard. I tested both power connectors with the cpu fan just to see if it was the motherboard and both worked fine.

So maybe that is why the motherboard got fried, and the capicitors started oosing...it was just over heating i guess. It looks like i am going to have to find a new fan. I think they had one at radio shack when i was looking for the heat sink compound.