Introduction

One day I came home from work and powered up my PC and there was no BIOS indication shown on either of my monitors. Turns out my Asus motherboard (MOBO). I purchased the Asus M4A88T-M back in the year 2012 from Tiger Direct, so it’s had 5 years of good service. Although I’m surprised that an Asus motherboard would ever get into the state where the board doesn’t boot and the BIOS screen doesn’t appear. Generally speaking the Asus boards are very reliable, so I don’t know what happened.

M4A88T-M with box
M4A88T-M with box

Troubleshooting

Here are the steps I went through to figure out the problem:

  1. Press and hold the MemOK button – to no avail.
  2. Remove DVD IDE connection and power up.
  3. Remove hard drive (2 SATA ports) and power up.
  4. Remove video card and power up.
  5. Remove Wi-Fi card and power up.
  6. Remove DDR3 memory sticks and power up.
  7. Remove AMD Phenom II x6 cpu and power up.

After the last step of removing the cpu, I realized the motherboard must have been toast

Dead M4A88T-M
Dead M4A88T-M

 

New MOBO

I went to Amazon looking for a replacement MOBO. I found the Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P (rev. 2.1) was a good choice; however I found Newegg offered it at a much cheaper price. I also ordered an AMD FX-8320E 8-core Black Edition cpu (this was a mistake); however, I found the performance of this device is very comparable to the Phenom II x6, and the Phenom II x6 may even be better than the FX-8320E.

Another MOBO

So I decided to look at the latest AMD cpus. I found out the new Ryzen cpus are current one of the best ever cpus that you can get your hands on. So from Amazon I ordered a new Gigabyte GA-AB350M-Gaming 3 MOBO with a Ryzen 1600 processor and also 2 new Kinston HyperX 8GB 2666MHz DDR4 memory sticks. I can hardly wait!

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