Bad board or processor?

MauiTechGuy

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A customer brought in an Emachine EL1852g-52w desktop ( Win 7 home 64bit, E5800 pentium proc, 3gb RAM ) that wouldn't boot. I checked it in and tested it, sure enough, no post.
I tested the PSU and HDD, both good, pulled RAM, 1 stick no beep, both stick's 1 long beep. Ordered a new MB ( G41T-AD ), installed it, and still no post:confused:. I also tested with a known good PSU to eliminate the possibility of intermittent voltage drop under load preventing post. I'm thinking that either I got a bad replacement board or the processor is bad.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
 
When you have a hardware issue, you start with the bare essentials and work your way up from there.

The bare essentials are:

Power supply
motherboard
processor (and heatsink with fan of course)
memory (1 stick installed in the lowest slot, they are usually numbered)

That's it. No mouse, no keyboard, no dvd drive, no add on video (unless your board doesn't have integrated video), nothing else.

If you do have an add on video card (because there is no built in video) then try another if the above fails.

If it doesn't boot with the memory in the lowest available slot, try each and every slot with just one stick. If there were two or more sticks, try another stick in each and every slot (by itself). Chances are more then one stick didn't go bad. One stick failing (or one memory slot failing) are not unusual, but multiples of either are.

Did you research what one long beep meant for that BIOS?

Try testing with the motherboard outside of the case.

CPU's rarely ever fail
 
In my 5 years professionally, and my many years personal experience I can only recall 1 bad processor. Most issues seem to be HD, mobo, Ram, and User.
 
1 long beep with all ram pulled meant memory issue for this bios. I tested both sticks in both slots, no video card, mouse, keyboard, hdd or dvd drive were connected. I tested the installed psu with a psu tester, also tested with a known good psu externally, still nothing.
I have also rarely seen a processor go bad unless the user was oc'ing the heck out of it and roasted it, but this was a facebook/email computer, so thats out. I think I'm going to have to rma the "new" board.
 
Both were amd chips, which I'm a fan of amd. One of them had an aftermarket heatsink installed which didn't cover the entire surface of the chip, the corners were left exposed and you guessed it, CPU had slowly cooked itself over time.

Second one was in a gaming rig, one of the fx 6100 chips ironically they were using stock heatsink and thermal paste. But I'm not a fan of some of the stock heatsinks. On that particular one they gave you an aluminum heatsink with copper core, but outside the core they had like fins so basically the corners were covered with fins it seemed. Plus to me if felt like the core was actually not flush with the aluminum. As you can guess, chip slowly cooked itself. Solution was drop another chip like in there, cooler master hyper 212 tower cooler and artic silver 5 thermal paste, temps were like 20 degrees below other CPU. No complaints yet.
 
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