First post, by SilverHawk
Hey gang,
It has been awhile since I have posted, but I have continued to mess around with some retro gear. Up until now it has been without much issue. I took a chance on a used Asrock 939 Dual-SATA2.
Upon visual inspection, it has a few bulging caps. That said, I decided to see if it would function. It came with a A64 3200+ and stock fan. I threw in a known good stick of PC3200 and a GTX 750ti. I had a new EVGA 450 watt Bronze PSU with a weak 5 volt. Once I hooked up power switch and tried to turn on fans would spin no video. Unfortunately, I do not have a case or speaker handy so no beep codes atm. I then swapped in an AGP GeForce 2mx. With that combo, I was able to get video signal and POST detects CPU and single channel memory. This is as far as I can get. I have used CPU and video cards in other machines, swapped out memory and tried a couple other working power supplies with stronger 5v rails. After clearing CMOS the post process doesn’t even get far enough to report a checksum error. It just freezes displaying CPU and memory.
My question is, does this seem symptomatic of bad caps or is it perhaps a bad bios? The caps need to be replaced regardless, but I do not currently have the tools or skill set to tackle on my own. Trial and error gets expensive and I would appreciate any suggestions on where I should start. Thanks for the long read/ramble.