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.

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.

Third, I tried putting in a fresh CMOS battery. Still nothing.

Fourth, I tried swapping the memory around in various configurations. Still nothing.

Next up I will see if I can find a graphics card to swap out the current one for testing. If that makes no difference, then there are only major components left as suspects -- the motherboard itself and the power supply (though that seems to be working: see above). I don't have an extra power supply, but this one seems to pass the smell test. That leaves the motherboard. I don't really know how to test a bare motherboard. Is there anything else I should be trying before I give up?

(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.)

Thanks for any advice!

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king@utoronto.ca
Department of Philosophy
170 St. George Street #521
The University of Toronto		   (416)-946-3170 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5R 2M8
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

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