I think I have checked/eliminated everything else. No pata stuff, all sata so disconnecting is easy. I should be getting the startup screen even if drives are shot. I get no display so can’t get to setup even. Substituted video card as first thought. No speaker on Mobo but I have a small piezo plugon for the mobo header pins which I plugged on to see if I got any angry beeps - nada. One would think that I should get at least a display on screen telling me ‘you’re dead, Jim’ even if it wouldn’t get to POST but there is no video output at all. And it is the ‘no display’ thing that has me thinking I’ll be doing an autopsy.
Power supply checks good, but I plugged in a spare to verify. So, that’s where I am right now. I can continue disassembly and swap out cpu but that gets a bit more involved since I have water cooling on this beast. That probably will be the next step, although as I said having to dig this deep into it gives me a perfect reason (or excuse) to do an upgrade since the one BIG reason I can’t play with this machine is because when I take it offline (or even reboot for the ever popular Windoze Updates) I start taking flack from those downstream on the network.. ;-)
And FWIW I seem to remember that article on repair shops. Always had a spare ‘test’ pata cable around after that.. (Of course since nothing I have uses pata now - or in the future since it’s considered ‘legacy’ and not even included on new mobo’s - I presently have a slew of ‘spare’ pata cables should you or anyone need one.. ;-)
Assuming you tried multiple monitors and multiple monitor cables.
Is this debice new-fangled enough to have a dedicated monitor slot? I can’t remember if you can troubleshoot those by putting in an old “any-slot-will-do” video adapter and seeing what you get from there. Also, I’m assuming there isn’t an old on-board monitor port that you had stopped using and the BIOS might have reset to send everything to that port.
Last thing I have before you get to a possibly fried CPU is RAM. If you have extra RAM to do everything you want to do you might try one card at a time. A bad SIMM or SoDIMM or whatever could make for a bad day.