I have two Pentium 4 PC that display nothing on screen! Help!

[sirgilmour]

I Have bought a lot of comp parts that came with 2 full Pentium 4 and the guy told me that they had been tested on screens, and all that stuff , but I've never succeeded displaying anything on my working vga screen. I tried pci cards with VGA Output , no more results.
By pressing power , fans are turned on and hard disks rotate, the cd / dvd drives open and close ...
I removed the battery from the motherboard played with the jumpers but still nothing appears. If only I had access to the Bios I could try a few tricks, but I am here to ask for help from more advanced technicians.
Do you think I got screwed and there is opportunity to revive them?
Do you think it's possible to find a motherboard with equal or superior quality, compatible with the desktop case for a low cost?
Thank you

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[DaveLembke]

For starters... are you sure the monitor your using is a good one?

Have you tried all VGA ports for a signal since these systems have multiple VGA outputs?

Next remove those video cards from the system and try to boot using only integrated video. In the pic's I see one that looks like it has 2 video cards stuffed into it and the other has one video card stuffed into it. You want to lower the power demand by removing them from equation.

Next... remove the power from optical and HDD as well as remove any cards that are unnecessary for an attempt at a minimal boot.

If still no luck, then try swapping out a power supply with a known good power supply.

This is assuming that the CPU, RAM, and Motherboards are good.

If you have other systems of the same era, you can swap out known good RAM with the RAM of one of these systems.

CPU's rarely go bad so i wouldnt target that.

The last thing I would expect it to be after testing all of this would be a blown motherboard.


**** At my prior job I serviced both the Compaq and Dell computers that you have shown. The Compaq is one of 2 motherboard types the early style with the PC-100 to 133 SDRAM Pentium 4 1.5 to 1.8Ghz type and the later 2.0 to 2.6Ghz Pentium 4 with 266Mhz to 400Mhz DDR RAM. The Dell is probably a 2.0 to 2.8Ghz with 2.4 and 2.6Ghz being more common for this enclosure model type and uses DDR 266 to 400Mhz depending on the age of it and specific model #. They used this enclosure for many like models. The Compaq you have there if its the early Pentium 4 with SDRAM you have to worry about someone stuffing too much memory into it. They maxed out at like 768MB RAM for some of the early boards. The later boards maxed out at 1 to 2GB. I'd attempt booting off a single stick if none of the above helps and you dont have a like system to boot off of known good memory.

The good thing about the Compaq is that its pre Capacitor Plague era for Compaq. The Dell though could have bad Capacitors. I'd check both of them over though as for capacitors do fail and when they do they sometimes swell and blow out their electrolyte. It you see any without flat tops that are domed or crud that is on the tops of them then you have a serious problem.

HP/Compaq has their major Capacitor plague mainly with their Business Class systems like the DC5000 tower and SFF desktop models of the Pentium 2.66Ghz to 3.2Ghz line. Dell is more common to have the Capacitor Plague in the next generation model to the one that you have here which is also with the Pentium 2.66Ghz to 3.2Ghz line since they were manufacturing at the same time in competition with HP/Compaq and they both bought these bad boards or caps if self manufactured. The manufacturer for that Compaq you have is probably an INTEL brand board which are well made. The Dell board in the Dell was either made by Dell or also Intel if my memory is correct for that product line. HP/Compaq later started going with ASUS for their boards and other brands. Dell's boards were mainly proprietary so they were special for the range of like models. They even made proprietary power supplies in some models which makes for fun replacing a bad power supply. The good thing is that I believe the Dell you have uses the universal 20-pin with 4pin 12V molex so if a power supply is needed it would be pretty easy to swap out with another.

[sirgilmour]

1 = Compaq Evo D510
2 = Dell Optiplex GX260

i have succeded reviving the displays on the GX260 yesterday and after a while of trying things (updating the bios to latest and installing windows7) the displays went away and its back to black screen from the start.

[jefrey]

compatibility issue