psychz wrote on 2016-05-01, 13:48:
Happy easter! Here I have what appears to be a dead ASUS M2N-MX SE Plus rev 2.02g which is probably dead. It appears to power on (green led, cpu fan starts running, no beeps) as soon as I switch on the PSU, and when I connect a PCI diagnostic card it reads no POST codes at all, however it indicates all the voltages as available and the RST signal as stuck (reset led on the card is always on). The motherboard appears clean, with no broken traces, leaked/bad/blown caps or toasted-brownish chips. Pins are straight, nothing appears to be shorted... Clear CMOS/RTC doesn't help either. What might have been the cause of something like this? Is it something repairable or am I just tossing the thing altogether and keeping parts? Just asking because I have never seen a similar issue to this one before!
I just spent all week-end reviving a Socket 7 TX97-XE motherboard which was exhibiting the exact same issues. All required voltages seemingly present on the POST card, CPU gets warm, no post, no codes, reset line stuck on. After lots of hair pulling, I found that it would come out of reset only when I would apply a slight bend to the motherboard around the ATX power connector / CPU socket. I really hoped it was not an internal trace nor the chipset as no damage was obvious.. It turned out one of the power mosfets had its metal tab no longer soldered to the board.
So I de-soldered the two pins, cleaned them and the tab underneath, cleaned the motherboard pads, applied fresh solder and re-soldered it to the board. It's been rock-solid since.
Turns out that mosfet is the one that provides power to the CPU.. The pentium mmx is a dual-voltage chip, vcore and I/O voltages are seperate and both provided to the CPU. This mosfet is what outputs the 2.8V for the vcore. So my CPU was probably getting warm from the I/O voltage and I guess potentially erratic and occasionally present vcore.
I really ought to thank Bits und Bolts for the P2B repair marathon and also the video with the sporadically working PS/2 keyboard input. When I flexed the board and it would get out of RESET, I immediately thought of all the mosfets that became loose on the P2Bs and this was the first thing I checked after - and it was the culprit!!!