I have what may turn out to me a simple question..but not to me.
I think that either my motherboard or my CPU died but I can not tell which one.

I am hoping that if I describe my problem, somebdy might have some advice.

First off..I have an Athlon 1700 socket A CPU.
And I have the MSI KT3-Ultra2 motherboard.

I have not made any changes to the system lately.

When I turn on the power, the PC powers up..but nothing else.
What I mean by that is that I do not go thru any bios bootup functions or any kind of functions, the monitor is telling me that it is not getting an input from the video card,no beeps,etc.

I have changed out the video card, disconnected all drives and even disconnected the hard drive trying to get the PC to at least go thru the bootup process prior to accessing XP on the hard drive.....nothing.

I unplugged the PC and pulled the battery on the motherboard thinking it might be that the bios is somehow corrupted....nothing.

The fan on the CPU heatsink is spinning with the power on. This tells me that the motherboard is at least passing power to that. (MY fan heatsink is powered via a connection on the motherboard)

I am at a loss to try to diagnose any further.
As I said, I am guessing that the CPU or the motherboard is the problem and I do not want to replace both. In fact, if somebody has an idea to bring this system back to life, I would love not to replace either.
But I have an ugly feeling something has died.

Since I never tried, I do not know....would the motherboard go thru the boot process without the CPU?
And what would you think can be the problem?

Thanks

9/28/2005 12:57:21 AM

this could be voodoo computing on my end, but I've had a similar problem and it was RAM related. Make sure it's seated in there well - take it out and put it in another slot if you want to make sure you're making solid contact.

That probably won't do shit, but it's worked for me before, so hopefully it'll be something simple like that.

9/28/2005 9:09:46 AM

do a visual inspection on the MB looking for burnt caps, loose resistors, etc.

9/28/2005 10:02:45 AM

yeah try one stick of RAM that you know is good. Doesn't have to match your mobo speed, just type.

Check for busted shit on your mobo like he said ^.

9/28/2005 12:18:11 PM

Thanks to all that gave advice.
I am now thinking that it is the motherboard that crapped out on me.

Here is what I did..
I did re-seat the ram and, as I have 512MB of 2 256MB bars, I tried it with each one individually...nothing.
Next, I remembered that I have an old 1.2 gig AMD CPU.
I put that in and still nothing.
This isolated it to the motherboard for me.

Now I do have a followup question.

My 1.2 gig processor is about to go back into service along with the 1700 Athlon.

I believe that the 1.2 gig is for a 200FSB
As socket A motherboards are starting to become scarce, I found an ASUS A7V400-MX
It is 333FSB and 400FSB.
My question is this...
I realize that the motherboard will not work any faster than the CPU will allow.
But I just want to confirm that the motherboard SHOULD be backwards compatible.

9/28/2005 11:44:46 PM

[yes]

9/29/2005 4:12:38 AM

yes

9/29/2005 9:01:33 AM