Have you ever had a motherboard die?

[ioni]

I'm pretty sure my mobo is dead. For the past few months, I was having issues where my PC would randomly restart once in a blue moon. More recently it was restarting multiple times a day. One day it shut off, but didn't turn back on. A couple days later, I got it to turn on again after plugging it into a different wall socket and it was running great again. So I thought the issue was the power source. Then it suddenly shut off again a few days later. I haven't been able to get it to turn on again since.

When I couldn't turn it on originally, the only things that powered on were my case fans that were directly hooked up to the PSU. The fans hooked up through the mobo stayed off. Now the same thing is happening again. It's like my mobo died, resurrected, then died again.

Does that make any sense? For anyone else who's had mobo problems, did you experience similar weirdness. I'm still not 100% sure it's the mobo, but I'm not sure what else it could be since the PSU seems to turn the case fans and my GPU fans on. But if it was the mobo, I'd think that it wouldn't send the signal to the PSU to turn those things on when I hit the power button.

 

[Berliner]

Check your caps.

I had more than one die due to bad caps, back in the days.

 

[Burpo]

Could be the power supply, but most likely mobo caps..

 

[MongGrel]

Yeah, I've had them die from caps, but that was over a decade ago.

It might still happen I guess, depending on what your using.

 

[ioni]

Yeah, I've had them die from caps, but that was over a decade ago.

It might still happen I guess, depending on what your using.

I'm using an X58M. Do I need extra HW to test capacitors? Or will they just look burst out?

 

[Puffnstuff]

You'll know a bad cap when you see it. It will be mr obvious when you look at it. With that said a failing power supply will also exhibit the symptoms that you've described.

 

[ioni]

With that said a failing power supply will also exhibit the symptoms that you've described.

True, though the fans turning on makes it seem like the PSU is ok. But since it's only 2 years old and still under warranty, so I'm still trying to get it RMA'd. It'd be great if it really was just the PSU, since that's much easier to replace.

I also didn't notice any caps that looked unusual.

 

[Charlie98]

Exactly what board are we talking about here?

I had an issue with a ASRock board and the 24-pin power plug... Could be a loose plug.

 

[ioni]

Exactly what board are we talking about here?

I had an issue with a ASRock board and the 24-pin power plug... Could be a loose plug.

It's an X58M. I've already tried unplugging everything and plugging it back in. That's like, the 1st thing to check!

 

[Omar F1]

Broken a Socket-A board back then, I was fighting to install the cpu cooler, got it seated after multiple tries but no post.

I also remember installing SD ram in the opposite direction, half of it was it and the board got busted.

 

[Puffnstuff]

Just keep at it until you find the problem and let us know what the answer is just in case someone else has the same issue.

 

[MustISO]

Funny you should ask. Just had an Intel motherboard fail in a very weird way.

About 2 weeks ago it started booting to the EFI shell. Disconnecting the optical drive fixed the issue. Yesterday it was working great and I installed a second hard drive. After that it would boot to the EFI shell. I disconnected the hard drive, powered it on and it just hung at the POST screen.

Reset the BIOS, nothing. Pulled the CMOS battery, nothing. Error code is 71 on the motherboard. I pulled out everything and ran with onboard video and it hangs at error 72.

Strangest thing I've ever seen.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Generally -- more likely in the area of political opinion -- folks can be lazy. They'll seize on one instance, one event, one observation. Then they'll make far-reaching conclusions about it. At least here, our focus is on things digital. Even a statistical sample can be much smaller and still offer "insight."

I had one motherboard actually die -- or just seem "awry" -- a year or two after replacing the power-supply. I think it was an Intel Tucson board for Pentium-II. No? Maybe . . . late Pentium.

Other times, some component part of the board would die, such as the Ethernet port. Those sorts of things don't necessarily deter you from using the board; you simply get a replacement add-in card for an appropriate PCI/-E port, disable the onboard component in BIOS, and tango on.

Recently, and for the good part of this last year, I began to have problems with a system that had been running 24/7 for five or six years. Oddly but no less pertinent to the issue, it had been in a "sleep" state for a majority of hours during the last two years of operation.

I had "bad RAM," and replaced them through RMA. There arose some hard disk corruption, so I reinstalled the OS. Strange things continued to happen: I was using Primo-Cache to cache the hard drive in RAM, and despite lackluster guru-conclusions about the program, it had been rock-stable on a laptop system. I discovered that clearing the cache took care of the problem. So far, so good -- so I thought. I decided to replace the mobo, RAM and processor anyway.

The PSU was Seasonic, and I'd forgotten that it had been running since 2008. When I tried to initialize and enter the BIOS with two successive motherboards, the lights had come on, the fans were spinning. But -- "no cigar." It had been the PSU all along, proven when I put in a spare PSU that had racked up at most 3 hours of "on-time."

I offered the motherboard-RAM-CPU discard to a friend and electronics-tech veteran. He observed that no matter how good the PSU, no matter how long its warranty, leaving the computer in a sleep state for days at a time would slowly cook some PSU components. Most mainstreamers wouldn't have a clue. No mainstreamer -- neither did I, for failing to think about what a PSU continues doing through a sleep-state period.

What the OP describes could derive from any of a handful of causes. But for those symptoms, check the PSU first before discarding the mobo and/or components. You'll be lucky if it's that simple.

 

[ioni]

It must have been my mobo. I got a "new" used one off ebay and now I start up, but now this new mobo can't find any bootable drive! It sees all my drives in the BIOS setting though...

edit: I'm dumb. I was looking in the wrong menu. I was looking at the menu that lists all my HDDs, not the one the lists the boot order. I fixed the boot order and now it works again!

 

[Sheep221]

Still can be a PSU, ATX cable is rail separate from other components. So does the MB can be dead.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I've had one that died in the case due to bad caps, a couple that died while I was transplanting my system to a new case, and one that died due to a power surge.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I killed one friend's mobo, after he let me OC it, and I followed some guide on the internet (stupid, I know), that said to boost the chipset voltage to like 1.4v start off with, and then crank up the CPU clock speed. Well, it cooked the chipset (NV 775 chipset) real good pretty quickly.

I killed another friend's mobo, that had been running sucessfully for a few years (an IP35-E), when I went to upgrade it from an E5200 to a Q8200. I unscrewed the mobo from the standoffs, and when I went to put it all back together, I noticed that one of the standoffs was missing. Rather than investigate why it was missing, I ignored it, and just didn't put in that mobo screw. Well, it shorted something out on the back of the board, so I had to use the backup board that I had purchased a few months earlier for this friend, in case his board ever went out on him. Little did I know that I would be the one responsible for it dying...

I've also replaced friends' mobos, that have had bad caps and were in the process of dying. (Reboot problems, etc.)

 

[ioni]

FUUUUUUUUU!!!! It's randomly rebooting again! ლ(ಠ益&#3232ლ Maybe it is the PSU?

 

[phasseshifter]

if you have a spare supply swap it out..easy and best way to check..check your ram setting in the bios dont over clock it setup to auto settings in bios...try that too maybe firstly...check your core temp..you can down load it its free program...

 

[PhIlLy ChEeSe]

A faulty PSU could still turn on a case fan, the voltage for the CPU is on a different line.
Swap it out, sounds like its dieing a slow death.

 

[ioni]

if you have a spare supply swap it out..easy and best way to check.

Well yea, of course that's an easy way to check if you have a spare PSU. I have spare video cards, but no spare PSUs...

A faulty PSU could still turn on a case fan, the voltage for the CPU is on a different line.
Swap it out, sounds like its dieing a slow death.

The whole computer turns on and stays on for a random amount of time. Sometimes it'll stay on for a few minutes, other times it stays on for a few hours. I still think something was wrong with my original mobo, because it stopped turning on all together.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Outright die? Nope.

Broken features? Yes. H67 with a broken SATA 2 ports and a H61 with a broken ethernet controller. But both were already long out of warranty by then, so...

 

[artvscommerce]

Sounds like a bad PSU to me. The fact that it powers on the fans doesn't imply it's working properly in my opinion. Do you have an old one you can test with?

 

[Ketchup]

I have had 2 or 3 boards die on me: an MSI, an Epox, and I believe there was another but it escapes me. Might have been the DFI.

The northbridge on X58M ran pretty hot, didn't it? Excessive heat is a killer.

Replace that power supply and see what happens.

 

[Kenmitch]

Once had a Asus zombie board

Dang thing wouldn't power off. Shut off but would power back on after 20 seconds or so. Tried every conceivable thing to fix it. Asus gave me a dose of their infamous rma hell. Last Asus product I'll ever own for a long time!