Based on what you are describing, when your AGP graphics card died, the
failure trickled its way back through the bus connections into the
motherboard and started taking out components there. Most likely it blew
the northbridge, the big chip with the heatsink on it next door to the
CPU. It controls a lot of functions, including the AGP controller that
the graphics card talks to. In short, when your video card went, it
likely took the motherboard with it. You could try testing the
motherboard with a different power supply, just on the off chance this
failure took it out instead of the motherboard. You could also test the
original power supply with a known good motherboard you don't care about
losing. My thinking is to scrap the whole mess and start over with fresh
parts. Electrical failures can get nasty and unpredictable. Sorry for
the bad news.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [PCBUILD] GPU failure - could it destroy motherboard and/or
cpu?
From: Michael Eisenstadt <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, March 31, 2009 10:56 pm
To: [log in to unmask]

The computer is/was an Asus A7NA8X-X, cpu Athlon XP 3000+, 512Mb RAM,
o.s.
Win XP SP 1, Gigabyte AGP x8 slot nVidia 7600 series, silent pipe (no
fan)
using a
12v connector from the power supply unit. The Gigabyte gpu + Athlon cpu
which supports a
fast fps for playing FS2004 was bought in 2006 when the CPU was an
Athlon XP
2600+.
Gigabyte repaired it just inside warranty period. It blew its insides
recently with green artefacts
flickering on a black screen and, maybe, the motherboard and/or CPU at
the
same moment.
I tried the Gigabyte cpu in another computer with an AGP 8x slot and it
is
definitedly bad. But
with a known good PCI cpu, the mb could not bring up the BIOS nor beep.
The
mb
powered up normally. No beep is beep code for . . . I'm way over my
payscale
here so I
am writing to ask PCBuild subscribers for help.

The monitor from this system crash was not affected

TIA

Mike Eisenstadt
Austin Texas

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                         PCBUILD's List Owners:
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