Its a gigabyte ga-ex58-ud3r, which apparently is no longer made and i do not want to get it on ebay. Well anyway, i turn the computer on, no post beep (cannt remember if it did beep before), a green light comes on but it doesnt stay on, and im not seeing bios, or anything on monitor. monitor is ok. Video card is all lit up in lights, so i believe that is working, as well as the monitor doesnt report that its unplugged.

Before it died, i was smelling burning, but i am sick and have a stuffy nose so it was hard to tell. Does that mean my system wasnt cool enough?

This is what happened: i turned off my computer to vaccum the dust out of a fan, turned it back on, booted fine, updated windows update, restarted, booted into desktop, then poof it shut off on me.

is this basically the same mb? http://www.newegg.com/...aspx?Item=N82E16813128423

Any other suggestions for motherboard, or opinion if the motherboard is dead?

did the fan spin while you were cleaning it?
maybe a card is loose?
dunno. it's one of the reasons that i switched to laptops.

if you are smelling burning it's never a good thing (I have a scorched gfx card to prove that point). That usually means that either 1) your fan failed or was not working adequately or 2) something was causing an electronic component to short out. (1) is far more likely.

"i turned off my computer to vaccum the dust out of a fan". Depending on how you did it, you could have caused something to come lose at that point. You could try tightening everything but chances are your mobo (or one of the key components attached to it) is shot. Unfortunately it's hard to really test that without extra parts/another computer.

your old mobo is (was) lesser version than mobo on neweggs-link, all your old junk should work on new mobo too unless they got fried (processor and memories might have fried).

Heh...this reminded me of when I lost the mobo in my old firewall. It was an IPcop install running on a dell optiplex gxa...~384 MB of RAM and a 300 MHz slotted P2.

I had opened it up to blow the dust out of it, closed it back, and turned it on. It powered up, but nothing came up on the monitor. I opened it back up and pressed the power button. Nothing. I looked around, didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, then pressed and HELD the power button for a few seconds.

The southbridge exploded like the world's tiniest lightning bolt. I then noticed that one of the 4-pins had gotten hung up on one of the jumper prongs that controlled the speed of the CPU. I then fixed that problem and turned it on again. It would get past POST, but then it would reboot everytime afterwards.

Bought another mobo off ebay for around $15 and swapped the boards out. Everything else was the same. Still works today.

Many things can cause this to happen from vacuuming: static, solder joints(movement or bumping), unseated something, suffocated something with dust that somehow kept it within sanity, and the list really could go on. Point is if you had a solid layer of dust in there, no telling what could be damaged.

Pull power from it(unplug it from wall...) and let it set for a few hours as last ditch effort. Most modern computers use self healing "fuses". If one of those popped that's the fix.

However with the information provided I am not sure a diagnoses can be made as to whether the board is dead.

"a green light comes on but it doesnt stay on"
Where? What? Does the power supply, processor, or case fans all continue to run? Most importantly if it is not an SSD do you hear the hard drive spinup up when you apply power to the system?

Rear USB ports providing power when powered on?(Can you charge your phone or <insert USB charged device here>?)

Beyond that make sure you have no USB devices plugged in, if you have a ps/2 keyboard use that instead of a USB keyboard(or switch if the other way), try different GFX card, ensure that your monitor actually still functions(do you get OSD or no Connection messages can another device use it?).

Could be power supply, faulty anything, or just dumb luck coincidence.

neato. self-healing fuses. i should go read up on that.

should also check my 30" Sharp Aquos and see if it feels like displaying video again. maybe it just needs a flu shot...

ROFLMAO. It's Alive! woot! now what am i going to do with it?

it's dead again. wtf?

neato compleato yipee

i'll kill it completely before it hits the dumpster. playing possum ain't going to save it.

I havent been home yet to check my computer, but heres some things.

One thing i should say is that its a liquid cooling system, with 2 fans. The cooling system was cool to the touch. I have room to get 2 more fans, which i plan to do now..

All i did was clean the outside of the case where the fan vent is. there was no dust in the computer, which i was surprised, except in a filter near another fan that i vaccumed.

I did pull the power out last night. Its not a power issue, my usb mouse still lit up when the computer turned on.

There are lights on the motherboard. I believe it used to stay on and green when the computer was working properly. Now the green light on the mb flashes on when the computer is powered on but does not stay lit.

And like i said, the monitor doesnt say there is no connection and it lights up, so i think the graphics is good. I have no spare computer to test on sadly.

When i get home im gonna see if i can do further testing/examinating since im not sick sick anymore.

HDD spin up?

Just because the monitor doesn't say no connection and lights up doesn't mean it is functional or any other part of the video system is functional.

If liquid is the case then I must ask the obvious... any leak? water or non-conductive/non-corrosive? Water damage doesn't leave a mark, just corrodes the solder joints.

If the USB device powered than the possibility of failed motherboard is lower.

So you left it with no power plugged it in several hours later and still no dice?

Those lights sometimes have real meaning but most times they are just connected to power good, 5v poweron, or any number of other PSU signals.

At this point nothing is ruled out... I would lean more toward the video card or PSU. Do you have HDDs? Listen for spinup, if it/they spinup chances are it's not power related.

Do you have an old video card or can you borrow one? XBOX360 or anything else you can try that monitor on?

When you power the system on do you get and disk activity? All silent?

Many times faulty processor or memory can hard stop POST as backwards and anti-implementation as that may sound or the fault allows passing POST sanity checks but then hard locks the system upon trying to do something more.

oh no

yeah the hdd spins up and runs. i took my computer apart last night. Took the ram out, cpu, cmos, and video card.

As a result, now i believe the video card is fried. it smells like it was burnt, and the motherboard led lights stayed on like i thought they used to do. I also noticed when i was basically done "operating" the fan on the vc didnt stay on the last time i powered it on, and that was causing it to smell worse when i was testing it with just the power connected and not seeded in the mother board.

The ram and cpu didnt smell fried, so this is a good step, esp since video cards are cheaper and dont require me to take the whole computer apart.

im looking around work now to see if there are any old digital cards in the computers we have.

if ram or cpu is fried doubt you smell that.

Yeah signs were pointing at the video card, it's always good to keep around a cheap video card just in case this happens.

For the record processors generate smell, but they generally have to be defective in a particular way to get hot enough to burn up without the thermal tripping.

Ram no clue, I don't think you can tax memory hard enough to cause it to burn.

i fried the memory and harddrive of my Gateway laptop about 8 years ago by sticking it in it's case when i thought it was hibernating. everything else survived. think that might've also been the last time i messed with linux. :-P

i probably agree that the video is more likely to fry in a desktop though.

wouldnt a sil1364add2-n (http://www.pricedbelowmarket.com/...ets/img/255163_4_600w.jpg) digital card work in my motherboard? my video card currently is an ati hd 4870 series (http://www.newegg.com/...spx?Item=N82E16814103193)

Asking because i placed the sil1364add2-n in my computer but it didnt work, but the card does work here at work in the older computers. When the card was in my computer it was getting hot, so i know power was getting to it...

That's not a video card from what I can tell. It appears to require some form of onboard graphics although I do not believe that includes the graphics built into the iCore Processors.

So basically you have an old computer with onboard graphics but no DVI port, this will give you a the DVI port.

In summation... No it won't work with your board, you need an actual video card.

that card is dvi add-on card not actual graphic card.

not that useful since real graphic card with dvi doesn't cost much.

that thing sells for $50

u can buy a real graphics card for less nowadays.

looks like a relic specialty video add-on to get 10 year old computers access to use DVI :P

Happened to me too... But everything got burned (literally), so I made a clone of the spare parts and leftovers of my 2 older PCs

Also bonus post

Fujitsu has added dvi-addon cards to some of their cheap models but its dvi-d not dvi-i so not that helpful.

with 50 bucks its possible to get Radeon HD 6xx0 card.

Ok well, with the old video card in it, the motherboard leds came on but didnt stay on.

With the new video card i bought, the leds stay on, witch means cpu load is current.

dynamic led: http://www.firingsquad.com/...x58-ud3r_review/page2.asp

Towards the bottom.

So i dont think the cpu is bad, but maybe the motherboard connector for video?

The first 2 lights come on and stay on.

Anyway, im going to get that motherboard i linked in my first post, but waiting to see if it drops price on cyber monday.

that mobo on your newegg-link costs here over 200 euros, most likely due its "old" mobo.

Use Decide.com. It's a pretty decent trend-tracker/predictor for electronic prices.

Just so everyone knows, it was my power supply. The lights on my mb should have gave it away, but i didnt remember if they lit up as faint as they were.

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