Motherboards can fail for any number of reasons.

If it happened to me, I would try to diagnose and repair it. Failing that, I would just replace it.

I did have a situation where I upgraded my PC last year. I wanted to reuse the old parts in a new case, but upon installing everything, it no longer worked. Upon inspecting the board, I discovered that a weak solder joint had caused an inductor to come loose. I re-soldered it in place and the board has worked fine every since.

This happened yo me too several years ago with an Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe. I was using it no problem at all, and it suddenly died on me.

Cpu, ram, psu and cards kept all working, but not the board anymore.

eliot_new wrote on 2026-08-30, 14:00:

Fortunately 3 years ago I bought cheap from eBay the same board with an i5-6400 and an Intel cooler.
Now after putting it into the ATX tower it runs flawlessly (thx to the almighty computer god!)

This is exactly what I do for my retro boards.
I try to have at least one working (or semi-working) backup.

eliot_new wrote on 2026-08-30, 14:00:

Question: have you ever experienced, that your main PC board suddenly dies?
How is this possible, I mean I have here a lot of very old boards, but they still run fine....

I've experienced only once a board that suddenly dies 100% - in the sense of 'electrically dead', like no response to the power button, as if the PSU is not connected.

This was a NEW board - less than a week old. A G41M board on which I tried to install a multiplier-unlocked QX6700. Maybe one of the fuses didn't handle the power drain and blew.

Most old boards die slowly. At first it sometimes fails to wake up from sleep. Then it doesn't POST some % of the time. The rate gets progressively higher, until at one point it refuses to post 100% of the time. Power is flowing, fans are on, sometimes there are motherboard beeps, but typically not even that. No POST screen, nothing.

1. Why is the cooler on the dead board screwed on so tight?

2. Does the dead board have a CPU socket backing plate on the back side of the board or do you now have a huge bulge on the back of the board behind the CPU socket?

Yes, I have had an ASUS board die like that... an LGA2011 board that was under warranty and it took an insane amount of time to get a working board. They literally sent me out a physically damaged board with missing components one of the times.

I also received another DOA board.

Every single time I have had to RMA something with ASUS it has been a nightmare.

I have them too many chances. I never buy ASUS products new anymore as there is effectively no warranty on their products.

I had a Compaq core 2 dua tower die with a proprietary power supply .

I examined everything could find no coorsion or bulging caps or any other damage, I removed everything I could, reseated and replaced ram in various ways.

And no changes, power is stuck on at power application full fans, the blinkenlight led on the motherboard that is supposed to tell you the system is functioning or if there is an error doesn’t do anything and the beeper never beeps.

I no longer have another duo to test cpu or PSU in another system but there is nothing obviously wrong on the power supply.

Very disappointing because especially now more than ever , I would love to have a basic core2 duo
but because the PSU is overpriced and proprietary (not normal atx+ ilk) I really don’t want to buy a part that is potentially not any better than I have.

My concern is the motherboard or cpu is bad and on these final generation hp/Compaq tower it’s not worth fixing over just buying a standard motherboard

On new mobos I'd suspect some freakin' mosfet or cap overheated and gave up... kills the entire thing... If the board just doesn't even want to signal power to the PSU then it must be a short somewhere on the board..

I got a thread ripper motherboard that was working perfectly before being sent to me, and on arrival it powers up but the POST code doesn't budge beyond 00.. CPU and RAM were totally fine when moved to a replacement board.. haven't gotten to investigate what happened to the broken one though. It was very well packaged during shipment.

Asrock of this vintage used too small linear regulator for one rail I dont remember now which one, maybe 1.6V? often slowly died resulting in problems with powering on until board died completely.

Way back when I had a Dell Precision 690 as my main working PC.
I replaced it, was back in within a few days.
Still have it and it still works, great space heater in the winter months it is too.

I've saved two ASUS board that had bios issues. Ebay has them for $15 with the bios preflashed, might be worth a try.

How "dead" is dead?

If the board completely fails to even start powering on, you probably have a failure in the power delivery. Given a different board does work with the same PSU, the proximate cause must be on the old motherboard, most likely in its VRM. However motherboard VRMs usually only tend to die when abused. It's telling you didn't mention your PSU. What brand+model is it and how old? It's entirely possible a bad PSU pushed the VRM over the edge. If in doubt, get a new PSU to avoid the new board suffering the same fate.

If the board does start to power up but fails to output anything to display, it could still be a power delivery issue, but BIOS issues sound more likely. Sometimes an ESCD reset (pressing power button for >10 sec when PC is unplugged) is all that is needed, but if the EEPROM has failed that might need replacing. Still, measuring voltages should be first step either way.

Yeah that power delivery can be a tricky thing.
I've had a couple of occurrences of thunderstorms messing up the power quality.
The computer would then either not power on at all, or it would just abruptly shut itself down after a while.
The power company promptly fixed whatever the problem was, so fortunately the solution was to just wait an hour or so.

I pull out the spare I have and then spend a bit of time diagnosing the dead one to see if I can resurrect it...if not then I have a shop that will happily take it for a donor board so it wont go to landfill. (The shop will check it out first for me, their kit and skills are a bit more advanced than mine)

If I don't have a spare (I always have a spare), then I overnight one from my favorite board retailer. I have enough spare computers that a day or week without my main box doesn't hurt.