Sadly, my first Socket A build died a few days back. I will revive her eventually; it's just that I don't have the necessary parts to do the repairs right now, but I've ordered them.

The symptoms:
1. Whenever I connect the PC to power, she automatically turns on.
2. I can turn her off using the power button if I do it immediately, if I wait a bit, I can't do it anymore.
3. No video signal.
4. HDD activity light is constantly on even with no HDD connected.
5. The PC doesn't post.

What I tried so far:
1. Removed the RAM and GPU (one at a time) to rule those out. I get the beeps for no memory, but not the beeps for no GPU.
2. Inspected the CPU. The CPU chip is slightly chipped from previous use, but it was working like that and it isn't significant. The thermal paste was ok. Turning the PC on with no heatsink makes the CPU go scorching hot, which is expected - AMD CPUs like this do not thermal throttle, you either get a thermal shutdown if the motherboard is set up to do it, or the CPU blows up.
3. Inspected the motherboard. Some caps don't look too well - the tops show the telltale signs of capacitor failure, although none of them has exploded or leaked yet. Even if they are not the culprit, they need to be replaced. I might as well just recap the whole board to be safe, tbh.

Will keep you posted. Even though this was the noisiest PC I ever owned, this had also become my main retro gaming rig, and I guess I owe her a repair for all the days of great gaming experience she gave me.

So my build is back in the land of the living.

I replaced the motherboard, FIC AN11 (VIA KT266A), for an Asus A7N8X-VM/400 (nForce 2), and the CPU, AMD Athlon XP 1700+, for an AMD Athlon XP 2000+, only to find out that neither of them was the problem. It was the GPU, the GeForce FX 5500+. I'll get to fixing it, but for now we're back to the old and trusty GeForce 4 MX400.

It is... an interesting experience, to be honest. I clearly had a CPU or RAM bottleneck with the previous build, because now the MX440 64Mb is performing a lot better than the FX5500+ 256Mb used to. Morrowind is actually very playable now. The bottleneck might have also been the AGP, on the old motherboard it was 4x and now it's 8x.

I also replaced all the fans, so it no longer sounds like a jet engine. It is not silent, and it is not supposed to be - but at least I can hear the HDD and the other parts of the PC, and it no longer competes with the speakers. The new Noctua fans sound quite pleasant.

I put the old parts in a different case, so I haven't given up on them either, I'm thinking of an ATI Radeon-based build on that one.