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Swapping possibly dead parts?

I

IndieSnob

Golden Member
I've been out of my house for about three weeks now while letting some guests stay and had lugged my computers downstairs to get them out of the way. I powered on both, and noticed that my Asus P4B266 P4 1.6A was not booting. I opened it and noticed it smells abit off, not a heavy ozone smell, but some sort of smell. I quickly checked all connections, and everything looked fine, such as cpu fans, power fan, seating of memory/video, etc. I took the retail hsf off of the P4 and it does smell abit funny in that area, but I'm not sure if that's it.

The power still comes on the system just fine, and the dvd rom drives show power flashing on and off and I can open the trays. I get no beeps, and I tried randomly taking out sticks of ram.

My question is this, is it safe to put the CPU, Video, etc into another P4 board? I don't want to short my other board with a bad cpu if possible. The motherboard/cpu/video/memory system that is not running now is an Asus P4B266 board, a P4 1.6A running with retail hsf, cheap old 16 meg TNT2Vanta AGP (my G4 went TU in that system about a year ago), with 2 128 meg PC-2100 sticks, and a 256 meg PC-2100 stick. Power supply is an Antec 350 watt, in an Antec case. The other board I have that's running is a Gigabyte G8IEXP board with a 2.0A P4 w/ retail hsf, and a 512 meg stick of PC-2100, with a 300 watt PS. Should I try putting the video card and cpu in that system to try it out or? Like I said, it's been so long that I've had to muck in my systems, and since I've been working as a tech. Any help would be appreciated!
 
Ok, so I put the Vanta in the Gigabyte and it posts just fine. Haven't tried swapping memory, but I'm sure it's ok. Smell still points to the cpu. Anyone know if I risk losing my Gigabyte board if I try putting the possibly fried 1.6A in there?

*Edit* Swapped PSU's, still turns on, but no post and no beep. Please anyone is it safe to try the 1.6A in the Gigabyte or the 2.0 in the Asus to see if it's the board or cpu?
 
Take the HD with the stuff you need and stick it in the working machine. Back up your important data before futzing with the busted computer.
 
You are on the right track, so I think that is why nobody responded sooner. If you think it is your CPU, take off the heatsink, peel off the thermal compound and check the CPU for discoloration. If you swap a bad part into a working setup there is always the possibility of frying more parts.
 
Turns out it was the damn memory. My Asus P4B266 has always been stupidly freaky with memory configurations. Comes down to you have to have double sided in only one slot, and singles in the other two for them to work together. I had allready known this, but I mixed in working memory and still didn't work. I swapped PSU's, CPU's, etc, still didn't work, and then I found the culprit. After going through about 15 combinations of memory, it finaly worked. It just seemed off after all that memory worked well together for over a year that it would stop. I then put in the non working stick on my Gigabyte board. It worked for the first boot, then would lock up. Now have to rma that stick. God I hate my Asus board.
 
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