Repair and upgrade of old system

Peters · 6 Jan 2015 at 03:17

Hi

I've been using a fairly old system and it looks like the motherboard has died. I can't get it to POST and there's no video signal, although fans and drives are spinning and the motherboard led is lit. There are no POST beeps from a small beeper I have plugged into the board.

The motherboard is an Asus P5-KE with an E6750 processor and 4GB of Geil DDR2 ram.

If anyone has any more suggestions for tests, I've tried quite a few disconnecting drives, graphics card etc with no luck.

It may be time to think about upgrading the system, I'd be looking for a reliable board, something like an i3 processor, 8GB ram and a quiet CPU heatsink. My budget is around £300

I'm hoping to re-use the case (Antec Solo), PSU (Corsair HX620) and drives (Samsung SATA DVD & HDD)

The graphics card is a 6770, although the onboard graphics out now are probably better! I use it mainly for watching HD, web, general use and a couple of very old games.

cjgardens · 6 Jan 2015 at 08:57

Firstly I would pull the hdd and dvd out, then try 1 stick of ram at a time.

Also do you have another gpu to test?

Edit: clear the bios then try above :-)

ED209 · 6 Jan 2015 at 09:09

as cig said, try what he suggests, if the motherboard light is on it means its getting power as mine as two lights on which are red all the time.

sounds like it could be a gpu issue if its starting up but not displaying anything.

had a quick check and your motherboard as 2 PCI E slots, try the gpu in the other slot and see if you get anything.

does the card have any other outputs you can try at all?

try re seating all the cables and any power cables for the GPU as sometimes re seating all the cables can sort out the issue even just re seating the memory can sort out issues

Peters · 6 Jan 2015 at 09:31

Thanks cigardens and ED209, the one test I didn't try, pulled all four sticks of ram out and tried just the one stick. It's working again. Now to see if the other three sticks will work.

edit: also found out the beeper works with no RAM!

edit2: re-seated all four sticks and it's now all working again

Looking at the alternatives if it did turn out to be dead has got me interested though. I'll have to visit here more often and think about a more up to date system.