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Update Well after scratching my head for some time I decided to buy a new motherboard and install a fresh copy of XP. To my suprise after connecting the hard drive the old system booted up with no hickups after which I installed the mobo drivers and now I'm up and running. Very happy bunny and best £30 ever spent, thanks gygabite and thanks to you guys! P.s I have a faulty motherboard for sale. :-) Take care all. D

Does this look like a blown cap to anyone ? There's a very slight buldge on the top as opposed to the others which are completely flat.

That's a lot of power! I decided to get it only because pretty much everyone recomended it for price/power. :D What can I say it never let me down and of all the times I looked at the task manager I have never seen it go above 30% with a maxed out workstation which is why I would get another in a heartbeat if need be. Anyway I managed to take a pic, you can see the blown capacitor outlined and you might even see the puss if you can zoom in. And that's how things stand at the moment, I can't get a new system because there's too much valuable work on the hard drive which is why I want to get the same mobo and hopefuly it will boot up again with no conflict. BTW I tried the psu in my old pc and it powered up, I can't test the chip because the mobo is too old. I don't know what to do as I still have no idea what went wrong. I really don't want to lose my hard drive, should I just buy the same mobo power it up and hope for the best? Any advice? Thanks guys

Well I think I will buy ASUS P5P43TD which seems more than adequate motherboard oh and a new psu aswell, but I was just wondering in the unlikely event that the processor is damaged would there be any risk to the newly installed psu and mobo? if that's the case I could just buy another processor but I don't want to risk blowing anything up. :o

Did I get that right that you powered the board up without CPU fitted? I understand it that the CPU actually gives the order to start, but even so, you really ought not do that. At that point was the memory also removed? Yes, but by powered up I mean the fans came on as normal and that's as far as it went and yes the memory was removed too as was everything else. I felt like I had no other choice so I was hoping I could at least get into bios to try and reset it again but it wasn't to be. I don't know what chips you have fried, it may be the CMOS chip, or anything really, but I wouldn't expect it to come back to life now. Yeah neither would I, I realise I would probably have to buy a new mobo but I would just love to know what went wrong so it doesn't happen again. Also, I doubt your CPU is goosed, unless there was a major power spike into the board from a faulty PSU. CPU's have thermal cutouts, as do boards if they are setup so heat probably wasn't an issue here. What I don't get is why the computer restarted followed by the overclock failure message and then automatically went into bios, that's when I reset and saved the bios to default and after that it didn't power up, strange.

Hi guys, I have a PC running windows XP, Asus P5B motherboard and q6600 processor. Yesterday in the middle of doing something my PC restarted just as if there was a powercut and a message showed up saying something along the lines of " your attempt to overclock has failed, please restart or save settings...." or something like that which I thought was strange because I didn't attempt any overclocking whatsoever as I'm pretty happy with the processing power. So after that message when it restarted again it wouldn't boot and just kept turning over as in power on/off/on/off literally flickering and the fans playing ambulance whirls. lol First I thought it was a psu so I went and bought a new one (with slightly more Watts) only to find after installation the same thing happen. (gutted) Btw prior to that I changed the power cable too so it's not that. So I started removing all the devices and going about it by the elimination process until I was left with just the mobo and processor. When I took the processor out the mobo started up as normal, well the psu fan was a bit whirly but at least no disco lights this time. What strikes me is none of this stuff is old and the work I was doing wasn't that hard on the processor for it to just die. TBH I'm still unsure what the problem is which is why I'm here. I don't have the money to buy another processor to check so I was hoping maybe someone could help me. Like I said I'm really gutted because when I opened her up everything looked brand new and I only had it for a year. Second issue is I tried to clear the cmos by changing the jumpers but due to all the frustration (excuse) I forgot to put it back in it's origin place before starting the PC and it popped a small chirp and a tiny black smelly substance oozed out of one of the black chips next to it, would this have done any major damage to the mobo? Thanks for reading and any help would be much appreciated. ps. reallly sorry if this is in the wrong forum so mods please move to correct place if need be, many thanks.