Hey guys. I got a couple of these odd PCCHIPS M787CLR / ECS P6VEM2 motherboards:

These boards were a pain to have back in the day. No AGP slot, and a rather slow C3 CPU, but for a retro-PC build, they might be intresting, since the VIA CPU can be clocked on the fly with setmul, and the ISA slot lets us use any ISA sound card for great dos compatibility. I'm not sure what kind of on-board video it uses, possibly a SiS 630 witch is less then stellar. Hopefully it comes with a Trident Blade 3D on board video, but I doubt it. The Trident is quite a bit faster then the 630 and has excelent compatibility with DOS games.

One of the boards worked after a quick recap. The culprits were the 1500uf caps, witch seemed to be OK visually, but at closer inspection:

After recapping, the 1st board posts and seems to run OK:

That "VIA C3 - Giga Pro CPU" is hillarious. I believe these in fact come with a VIA C3 667A CPU, making the "Gigahertz" and "Giga Pro" labels complete fabrications.

The second board unfortunatly refuses to power on. It doesn't fail to post, it will not power on. At all. Shorting the power button pins does nothing. So far I've done the following:
- looking for shorts - could not find any.
- checked all 1500uf and 1000uf capacitors. I desoldered all of them, tested them with an ESR and capacitence meter, they all tested well withing spec. No leaks, no bulging.
- checked for broken traces - and in fact found and repaired a few - board will still not power on:

I've never seen this behaviour before. Usually the boards I play with will power on but fail to post, let out magic smoke, or trip the short-circuit protection on the PSU. This board does none of these. It's like the power button is not being engaged.

Any ideas?