Working on an athlon xp system. Fished this board out of storage and started working on it today.

When powering on (out of chassis, on wood with confirmed working ram and confirmed working fx5200 from another system) the mainboard will receive power and the heatsink fan will begin to spin (using a modern am4 wraith rigged to the socket, cools the chip very well and makes great contact).

After this, nothing happens. No display, no post beeps, nothing. At first I thought maybe the CPU was just dead? So I took the heatsink off for a split second while running and used a special thermal measuring device (a pair of tweezers) to see if it was transferring heat and it was.

Have tried several PSUs, several sticks of DDR, a couple video cards. Unfortunately this is my only athlon and only socket A mainboard I have so I can't verify one or the other 100%.

I noticed one cap bulging, replaced with a modern capacitor of the same spec, but no other caps have noticeable issues.

Anybody had any similar issues, any input? I'd like to use this system in place of my garbage heap pentium 4 1.6ghz but if the CPU is dead I'm better off upgrading to a 800fsb pentium than buying a whole new athlon setup as they're fairly expensive now.

Thank you!