The Asus motherboard fails to boot after a restart.
The Asus motherboard fails to boot after a restart.
I've got an older ASUS M2N-e SLi AMD board with an Athlon 64x2 6000+, ATI 3850, and 3GB DDR2 RAM. It's behaving oddly—will boot into BIOS but never loads an OS. I tried installing Windows 7 for benchmarking, but the system won't stay online. After a clean CMOS reset it works fine, letting me tweak settings without issues. Restarting causes it to loop infinitely and fail to post. Resetting the PSU and holding the power button briefly helped once, but didn’t fix the core problem. The chipset heats up noticeably, though the heatsinks aren't scorching, and fans are always blowing directly onto the GPU area with the chipset. Caps look okay. Any suggestions?
Examine the soldered caps on the motherboard closely... if any appear swollen or leaking, the board is damaged and you should replace them immediately if you plan to use it again. I own an old ABIT Fatal1ty FP IN 9 Sli board that requires cap replacement, but I’m just too lazy right now to tackle it ^^. It functions almost identically, experiencing boot loops or freezing during startup.