I got my hands on an ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard that supposedly was not turning on. Easy enough – flash the BIOS, maybe it’s going to boot. But then it hit me like a truck.
This motherboard has a Nvidia chipset. Nforce 590 to be exact.
Queue war-like flashbacks to all the dead 775/AM2 boards.
Can You guess what failed? No? Let’s see then.
Diagnosis
After powering it on the motherboard greeted me with a 00 on the POST card and cold CPU. Any voltage on the processor?
NOPE.
Right, easy repair got thrown out the window at this point, but this isn’t my first dead M2N32, so I push onwards.
This board has a SOP-8 MOSFET drivers for each phase, ADP3110. For simplicity of this post I downloaded an archive of boarviews, unfortunatly when diagnosing I didn’t have it, so I had to do educated guesses based on each parts datasheet.
This screenshot shows the “PWMD” signal path, the drive signal for the controller. Any signal there?
NOPE.
5V? Present.
How about signal going to the AS3336G? Anything?
NOPE.
OK, then is the ADP3186 controller even active?
NOPE.
The picture above shows pin 11, marked as “P_+VCORE_EN_SB”, which is always low.
Any guesses where it comes from?
*DING DING DING* We have a winner! A dead MCP!
Great. What now?
I’m not sure whether this generation of ICs were affected by Low-TG underfill plague, as they are from that date and have this characteristic brownish-grayish underfill, which is also found in defective GPUs from that era, I’m going to guess that yes, these chips are defective. Unless I find a relible replacement MCP this board will become a parts donor, as it’s not fixable, not reliably fixable.
Easy fix, I thought. Great board, I thought.
EDIT: After writing this post I looked again on my other M2N32-SLI Deluxe, look what I found:
An engineering sample! Unfortunately it’s absolutely dead – no reaction to power, again very likely dead SB. Shame.
Thanks for reading!