how to tell if processor is fried

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westieg3's picture
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how to tell if processor is fried

i never really looked a processor without any thermal epoxy on it, but i want to know this before i try anything. i just wiped the remaining residue from the epoxy off the processor of the system that i'm working on. the system was previously overclocked and stopped working, so i wanted to know if it's fried since there is a gray square on one portion of the card. upon magnifying the square, i saw that it was made of little circles (or squares but i can't tell). i hope this doesn't mean the card is fried, but is it?

H77
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circles

If "made of little circles" means you see bubbles in the CPU's surface (usually on the underside), it's probably fried. Also, you switched from talking about a processor to a card... is this a card (cpu on a board with some other chips), or is this just the plain cpu?

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can you upload pics?

I would definatly tell if it was fried or not, if I could see it. also, is this a Pentium II? That is why you are probably referring to it as a card. Or, is this a mac?

westieg3's picture
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ah sorry i didn't go into det

ah sorry i didn't go into detail about that. it's an amd athlon socket 462 processor. i looked online and saw that other similar athlons have the same square, so i guess the gray was from thermal epoxy caked on. i put new epoxy on the processor and installed it on the board (asus a7n8x) along with the heatsink. i decided to see if it would turn on so i hooked it up with the power supply, raedon card, and sony monitor that were sitting around to get no results. the power light on the motherboard came on, but that's it. i'm confused now since i don't know if not having any ram on the board was an issue (the only ram i had access to didn't fit the stupid board). i would assume, however, that the systam (or what there is of one) would boot up and tell me there's no ram instead of sitting with nothing but a power LED.

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You need to have RAM in a sys

You need to have RAM in a system in order for it to boot. Usually a motherboard will beep if you power it on without RAM installed, but some don't.

H77
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ram

Yeah, if you try to boot a (PC) system without ram, or the wrong type, it'll either not do anything or give some beeps. I don't know what a mac would do.

westieg3's picture
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well considering the board is

well considering the board isn't in a case with a speaker...i wouldn't have heard that. well at least there's a chance that the processor isn't dead. it doesn't look that way for a system that was once overclocked and blew something.

westieg3's picture
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ah ok just put in a ram card.

ah ok just put in a ram card. still nothing. i don't have it in a case either so i can't get a signal from the board to tell me if something else is wrong. power supply, board, processor, ram, video card, and monitor... the only thing i'm missing is a hard drive, but i should be seeing more life out of this thing.

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athlon user

a good test for a blown processors is to hookup a system speaker an listen for three beeps with ram out it should beep several times if it does not the processor is not initializing so either board or the chip is blown but most likely it would be the chip

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check to see if the processor get's hot

I had one that the processor wouldn't even take power. another way, is if it get's hot, and doesn't do anything, it generally means that they processor is getting power,but not using it. So it would be the processor is blown, instead of the board. you might also want to see if the actually BIOS Chip gets hot. If it does, it means the board is dead, and the BIOS is fried. It would most likely be that the board got a surge. When a board gets surged, the BIOS is the first to go, as it is the lowest Powered chip (i think, only 1.5 volts from theone I had

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