question bout the caps

[ssmercurys]

now my board just got hit by this bug i believe because there is 3 that i can visibly see that have blown up but my question is can that take ur CPU out with it also, because I just purchased an Asus Nforce2 board and those are too expensive to take chances of sticking a fried cpu into it already...then loosing my new board in the process.

My board supposidally gets power due to the light on it but it wont work, im guessing thats the symptoms of the caps but anyways Do the bad caps fry ur cpu also? or just the board

[kc8adu]

it depends on whether or not the vrm blew up due to the bad caps.
often when the vrm fet dies it can pass +5 or +12 onto vcore which means bye bye cpu.check for fets shorted s-d or rectifiers shorted.
if none are found the cpu most likely survived.

[ssmercurys]

well could u tell me how to tell because I have no idea what VRM is...As far as I see none of them exploded but some expanded so I dont think it went critical but it did enough to my board to make it shut itself off..as far as the cpu wouldnt my bios shut if off if something like that happened..

I do have a bios with a safe shut off feature and I think that would probably stop it from going weird like that whether it died from heat or what not...but How could I test it to make sure?

btw I have a AMD Athlon XP1800+ with a Gigabyte 7vrx rev2.0 mobo

i was reading up on vrms and it seems those are on intel systems and not amd, so what could be wrong and if anything what can i use to test these VRM's and what do they look like

[BOCTOK]

Correct me if I'm wrong. VRM = voltage regulating MOSFET

These are the small squarish chips that are usually lying flat on the board with 2 leads on one side, located in the general vicinity of the socket and the caps. They get HOT under normal conditions. If one of those blew, you'd probably be able to see where the board underneath was discolored. Like it was burned.

[Topcat]

Actually VRM is a term for older boards standing for 'voltage regulator module', which back then were modules that unplugged from the board and could be upgraded/replaced if needed. Nowadays, they're all onboard the mainboard, but the name never changed...