| From: Peter King via talk <[email protected]>
|
| The motherboard on the failing system is a non-UEFI Asus P6T. The CPU is an
| Intel i7 950. I have 32GB of Crucial DDR3 RAM in it. The whole thing dates
| from 2009/2010 or so. I'm pretty sure I replaced the motherboard at least
| once already. There are four or five spinning disks of various sizes and
| ages.
Wow, that's an old processor. Introduced in second quarter of 2009.
Intel says that the max RAM is 24 G. The MB has 6 sockets -- an
oddity of that generation of Core processors.
<https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/37150/intel-core-i7-950-processor-8m-cache-3-06-ghz-4-80-gt-s-intel-qpi.html>
<https://www.asus.com/us/supportonly/p6t/helpdesk_manual/>
This processor uses a lot of power: 130 W TDP. Its fans probably make a
significant noise.
| A few minor updates.
|
| First, the problem remains the same: I never get through the POST, much less
| to the BIOS. No beep codes (or beeps at all), no display, no nothing; it just
| remains silent as the fans spin.
|
| Second, there seems to be power to the computer. The internal MB power
| indicator lights up, the fans spin up, the hard drives seem to all spin up,
| and the graphics card at least lights up.
I wonder if one of the power supply "rails" is bust. The power supply
supplies several different voltages, all on different rails. Sometimes a
heavily-used voltage is supplied on more than one rail.
One place that old systems deteriorate is in the connectors. Unplugging
and plugging things in a few times can clean the contacts and sometime get
them working again.
I have a power supply tester. Who knows it it is useful? Something like
this (not a recommendation for this listing):
<https://vi.aliexpress.com/item/1005001359834960.html>
They are fairly inexpensive.
You could borrow mine if you were willing to pick it up and drop it off.
Oh: and I have to check if I can find it. I'm near Yonge and York mills.
Alternatively you could check with a voltmeter (not as easy as you'd
think).
| (Where "giving up" means looking for another computer I can migrate
| all/most/some of the existing hardware to -- maybe an old tower that has room
| for lots of spinning drives.)
How many spinning drives? The more you have, the fewer systems are
available. Other than that, there are a million surplus systems that are
cheap and faster than yours. You might find too few SATA ports on a new
MB.
The current trend is to put lots of drives in a NAS. Some you can run as
a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks). That might be a good long-term strategy.
Too bad they are so expensive.
We have a USB dock for bare SATA drives. That's OK (not great) for
accessing the half dozen or so hard drives with TV programs recorded by
MythTV (recording stopped about 6 years ago).
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