What kills MOBO's

**WilliamP458** · November 11th, 2009, 05:41 PM

What can kill a motherboard. My daughter has a Gateway 556GE and it wouldn't turn on. I checked the switch on the front ,OK. I jumped the PSU and checked the PSU. It puts out the correct voltages on all the pins. So it looks like the mother board is dead.

**GroundZero3** · November 11th, 2009, 05:44 PM

A surge from a wall outlet, it just being old, capacitor leaking, failure of other parts of the motherboard, etc etc etc

**batmeat** · November 11th, 2009, 08:19 PM

everything GroundZero said, plus warping, compression...etc

**ShyguyXPC** · November 11th, 2009, 09:04 PM

for some of our members, Overclocking the System a bit too far will kill a motherboard as well.

**cksboy15** · November 11th, 2009, 11:06 PM

Heat, overwork (overclocking), warping, age, bad PSU's, power surges (not all the time but they do some damage that is usually blocked by the PSU), bad components (capacitors and such), sudden shock (aka computer falling or gotten knocked around), conductive liquids (only when it has power to it), and many other things.

SLI or Crossfire can do some damage too from what I've heard but I have yet to find enough evidence of that.

The main things are falls and bad PSU's, heat normally affects the other parts (mostly CPU and GPU).

**WilliamP458** · November 12th, 2009, 09:57 AM

She had a problem a while back. There had been a storm and it would no longer connect to the internet. It had an ethernet connection built into the mobo that died. I installed a PCI card and that fixed it. This time there was no storm. Thank you all for the help.

**stroyal** · November 12th, 2009, 10:28 AM

Twice I have had a PCI network card zapped by lightning, and the computer wouldn't start.
Both times I removed the cards and the computers were fine.

Of course you can't remove the on-board. I assume you disabled it.

As far as I know any bad PCI card can stop a computer from booting. I've also seen the same thing with a sound card.

**WilliamP458** · November 13th, 2009, 09:04 AM

I tried removing the cards, but no good. Thanks

**RacerX** · November 13th, 2009, 01:43 PM

Bad ram can cause it to seem dead as well.
fixed a friends sytem with that problem.
PSU had juice, pulled out the ram modules and started swapping them around and it booted. 2 of the 4 were bad.