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Hi, well I've got some problems with the spare PC that is cobbled together from all the spare stuff I have lying around. It last got used about 9 months ago as a lend to a film festival (they don't have much budget for PC's and that sort of thing) and has sat gathering dust since - I've wanted to try out Ubuntu and other things but this year has been a hectic to say the least (anyway I digress). So now the same people would like to borrow the PC again if possible so I tried to fire her up for some updates and a spring clean - here is where the fun starts.

I plug it in and switch on, a brief spin of fans then silence, this proves repeateable, even after a CMOS clear. Closer inspection shows that the CPU fan, system fan and PSU fan all spin for about 2 seconds then power down, the GPU fan doesn't move. Ok, so the ancient GeForce3 Ti200 in there has had its day so I swap in a the old faithful S3 PCI card - this is my 'if in doubt' card in case the AGP slot is bad etc. Switch on and the fans spin up ok now but about 5 seconds in the screen is still blank and there's a BIG pop, no smoke no smell but all is definitely not right so I power down. Time for a slightly less ancient ATI 9800Pro in the AGP slot, fire up and all fans spin (including 9800) but still no screen display or disk activity. I think this is time for some reflection, meditation etc before my next move which is why I'm asking here.

I have some spares still to try but I'm not all that confident anything is going to work, my current thinking is that the MB might be kaput. If that's the case I'm unlikely to be replacing it with anything else that will run a AMD 2500 XP-M proc, so the likely path is to wait for an upgrade to the E4300 that is powering the number 1 PC so it gets passed down the chain.

Still, if anyone has any useful tests I could try to resurrect the number 2 PC I would be very grateful.

I should have given some specs with that....

AMD 2500XP-M (no longer OC'd)
Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe MB
ATI 9800Pro
1GB DDR1 - 2x512MB - not sure of manufacturer but I think Kingston
40GB HD - WD I think
Sony DVD-rom + CD burner

Try replacing the PSU if you have a spare one. In most cases, it is the culprit when fans spin up and down but the system doesn't start.

I can give that a try, I thought given that power was getting to the board that it was one of the less likely candidates. Still, I've got a better PSU than is in there lying around so I'll give it a go.

Checking for busted caps while you are at it.

Flying Fox wrote:

Checking for busted caps while you are at it.

Ditto.

Busted caps on the mobo or in the PSU are my first guess.

Thanks for the suggestions, the culprit was the PSU as suggested, I have to say I thought it was probably ok as it seemed to be supplying power to the MB but it looks like it was in a pretty seriously degraded state. So the Auriga 300W (how did that get in there?) has been replaced by an Antec 400W although the noise levels just went up a few notches.

It looks like my problems were compounded by some GPU issues, the GeForce 3's fan doesn't spin but the card does actually work it turns out, the 9800Pro's fan does spin but the card doesn't work and predictably enough the S3 has no fan and works perfectly. If I'm honest, I actually got a bit sad when I thought the S3 was destroyed, that thing has de-bugged so many builds for me, it even used to be able to play HL1 on low settings - remember this is a PCI card we're talking about.

So this build now has a GeForce 3 with a busted fan running in it, do people think this is going to be a problem given that the people using it won't be doing any 3d stuff at all? I'm not sure how hot their office / room is so I'll ask, even if there's no air-con it's Autumn/Winter now.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions, it did help.

Use rivatuner to automatically downclock the geforce3 at windows startup. I used to keep my geforce3 running at 90mhz gpu clock and 200mhz memory clock (not sure about the memory). Whenever I needed to play games, I would crank that baby upto 250mhz core and 500mhz memory. It was indeed a beauty. Good old Asus Geforce3 Ti200. I believe it's still working in my brother's pc

You may be able to slap a fan on ghetto style to make that work?

Ah, didn't think to use that tool to underclock, but works beautifully - I've now got quite a bit more confidence it's not going to burst into flames on them.

The ghetto-style fix has occured to me, now I just need to work out if an Arctic Cooling silencer for a 9800Pro can be piggy backed onto a GeForce 3. For those Brits around who are old enough to remember Blue Peter when Shep was still alive - it's time for the sticky backed plastic to come out! Anyway, it's a project for another day. Thanks again for the help.

If this box isn't loaded up with PCI cards (i.e. the slots next to the AGP slot are open, or can be freed up by moving cards around), you could slap a passive northbridge cooler on the GPU. I've used the Zalman NB47J northbridge cooler to salvage a couple of old GF3 cards whose fans had died. As long as you've got reasonable case ventilation they do a decent job.

I've run my 9700 pro fanless for years since the fan broke off of it. A box fan blowing in makes it work for 3D, and it was fine enough in 2D (only discovered the dead and broken off fan when games were crashing as the desktop was still fine). Some cards are more tolerant of high heat than others. I had an fx5750 at work that had a fan conk out as well. It, too, was fine in 2D (although it eventually did die). Given the age of the card in question, I wouldn't be particularly concerned about longetivity. Is it worth the time and money spent on even a cheap fanless NB heatsink at this point?

mattsteg wrote:

I've run my 9700 pro fanless for years since the fan broke off of it. A box fan blowing in makes it work for 3D, and it was fine enough in 2D (only discovered the dead and broken off fan when games were crashing as the desktop was still fine). Some cards are more tolerant of high heat than others.

One of the GF3 cards I mentioned actually got hot enough that the dead fan had started to melt. The GPU still seemed to be fine though.

Is it worth the time and money spent on even a cheap fanless NB heatsink at this point?

Yeah, I suppose that's debateable -- $11 (with shipping) to salvage a GF3? Unless he needs some other stuff from Newegg (and can amortize the shipping cost), it's probably not worth it.

The basic point of this card these days is to keep a couple of AGP based MB's viable for the time being in the 2nd PC. I limit myself to the 2 so I normally have a few spares knocking around but I now seem to be a bit low on GPU's. If the underclock without fan proves stable (as I think it should) then I'm happy - saying that it does irk me that the after market cooler for the 9800 Pro never really got used and if I can get some value out of it then I will. There's currently no PCI cards in there so I could always rip a NB cooler off a dead MB in the future I guess.

Once the 45nm quad-cores come down in price a bit over here then the E4300 will migrate to the 2nd PC and AGP will no longer be a problem, maybe at that point I'll build a 3rd PC and give it to someone.

I'm still a bit amazed that these GPUs will run without fans, I always thought they needed them more than they apparently do.