VOGONS


First post, by cprieto

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A few weeks ago I acquired a old stock M811, in a box, sealed, not touched (even with that "smell of new") and I was planning to use it as a Win2k/XP machine for some retro adventures (yeah, I consider WinXP and 2K old now). The thing is, I connected the motherboard to the PSU, put a Duron 800 chip on it, connected the power switch and put just 128MB of DDR1 RAM on it and connected a simple buzzer for the speaker... Try to turn it on, nope, dead... Not even a beep, PSU doesn't even turn its fan on.

At the beginning I thought it will be the memory, tried with different DDR1 memory, nope, the same, dead, nothing, no beep, no CPU/PSU fan, dead...

Am I forgetting something? is it something I should know? is the mobo super dead?

Any help trying to figure out before throwing this mobo to the garbage would be appreciated!

Cheers!

Reply 1 of 7, by majestyk

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Well, ... it´s a PC-Chips!

But seriously, this might be dried out electrolytics. This even happenes when the board has never been used. And it´s from the "bad capacitor days".
Do you happen to have a picture

Reply 2 of 7, by chrismeyer6

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Did you check the bios battery or install a new one? I've had my fair share of motherboards that either won't power up or just act very weird if the battery is low or missing/dead.

Reply 4 of 7, by cprieto

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Thanks @chrismeyer6 and @majestyk, I measured the voltage of the battery:

file.php?mode=view&id=107345

But guess what, I went and got a new battery and replaced it anyway, it works now!

In any case, this is a pic of the mobo, thanks a lot for your help folks!

file.php?mode=view&id=107346

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Reply 5 of 7, by snufkin

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That's very red.

Problem with measuring batteries out of circuit is that the voltage can recover, but there's no actual power there. So as soon as anything tries to draw a current the voltage drops again. You can get a better reading by either measuring the voltage in circuit, or by sticking a resistor (say a 330 ohm, so trying to draw about 9mA@3V) across the battery terminals and seeing if the voltage holds up.

Reply 6 of 7, by chrismeyer6

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Excellent I've had my fair share of motherboards with dead or weak batteries that show no signs of life untill you replace it. That's a good base for a nice socket A build.