dead duron / KT7A?

[Romchip]

Okay, I wonder if anyone can maybe shed a little light on the possible cause of this little problem.

My bosses PC is a duron 800 on an abit kt7a, matrox 450 dual head, 512Mb crucial ram.

A couple of months back it started to become unstable, it would randomly lock up but not frequently enough to think there was a major problem.

Last night hte pc stopped working altogether.
The power comes on, the cpu / mainboard fans start running, the hard drive spins up BUT the video does not post, neither does the board.

We removed the memory from the board which normally results in a repeated series of 3 'beeps' but it stayed completely silent.

We have tried powering up with nothing except a PCI graphics card attached, still the same. Tried powering up with a fan connected to all mainboard headers, fans worked, mainboard did not post.

I personally am edging towards a fried processor, however, the system is not and never has been overclocked and it has a rated heatsink/fan combo correctly mounted. Could it be a faulty voltage regulator on the mainboard? We are going to try a test tomorrow with a duron from my bosses second PC.

Any thoughts?

[Archer]

Just a suggestion but try replacing the power supply,these can cause intermittant instability problems becuse of failure to deliver correct voltages.

[Romchip]

...and Archer has the corrct answer. Cheers for that. We put in a second PSU this morning and it worked. I'll push my boss towards a nice Enermax replacement.

cheers again.