How to tell if a cpu is dead

M

magus0216

n00b
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Jun 13, 2004
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Well my comp isnt starting up and im starting to think its the processor thats causing problems. Heres what happens when I push the power button.. The hdd indicator stays lit up (thought it was hard drive problem but i swapped hard drives and it didnt help); my cdrw drive starts blinking (i figured this ruled out the motherboard being dead because its getting some infro to blink from the mobo??); and all my fans and hard drive spin so i dont think its the psu. I dont have a spare processor to try and see if thats the problem but i figure it must be cpu or memory. Im running a 2.4ghz p4 on the i850e chipset (gigabyte mobo) with 512mb of pc1066 ram.
 
ok, i took my cpu out of my comp and started it up and it came on for a second and quickly shut off so i'm thinking that its not the processor? maybe its the ram??
 
Ok, the new suspect is the RAM because i took it out and the exact same thing happened; the comp turns on but nothing comes on the screen and I'm not getting through POST. So, does anyone know how I can find out if its the ram or the vid card?
 
A PCI POST card will tell you if it's doing anything at all.....
 
It's eyes will look like this:

+ +
^^^

*edit, ok that was completely unhelpfull but it made me laugh. Got any friends with spare parts? Somebody with a P4 you can stick in to see if it posts? How many sticks of RAM are you using? If 2 try using one or the other and see what happens.
 
Mr_Gl@ss said:
It's eyes will look like this:

+ +
^^^
Click to expand...
ROFL!!! :D

With this problem you can't rule out the motherboard being the cause. When memory goes bad you usually get some BIOS beep codes, some goes for the video. In my experience, the most likely faulty component in this case is the mobo. Get back to basics - Video, CPU, RAM, Mobo and PSU only, make sure it's not one of your PCI cards (if any) or IDE devices causing the problem. Maybe try another PSU also, I know your fans and drives are spinning but that doesn't prove it's running fault-free.

My #1 suspect is the mobo though.
 
did the fans turn on for a second and then the system shutdown, or did the fans run and you get no picture? first point = CPU in 99% of cases, second point = in most cases the MB.
when you got no memory, there has to be an error-beep, overwise something else stops the board before running.
 
In my experience with fixing PC problems I have often found that if the CPU is dead, the PC will not turn off even if you hold down the power button for 5 seconds or so. If the computer does turn off when you hold down the power button then it's probably something else. I have not played around with this theory enough to know if it's always the case, maybe somone else has noticed the same thing and can back that up.
 
If thick black smoke is pouring out of the CPU then you can safely say your CPU is dead :D
 
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