Testing a system board. Easy way

[tonepaq]

I have a system board failure on a T400 system here with Nvidia graphics. The replacement board has arrived from ebay, used and a bit questionable.

My question is what is the bare minimum I would need to hook up to the system to get it booted up and test that it works.

I know the CPU and fan assembly, RAM, AC power jack cable, CPU support plate, and some sort of display. Anything else? I just need a quick way of testing to boot to BIOS.

The seller has made clear that "UNIT HAS AT LEAST ONE BROKEN USB PORT" and he has many boards for sale so I assume he hasn't tested them all.

[RealBlackStuff]

Keyboard is missing, that's all.

[tonepaq]

Okay I have put all that on and immediately when I plug in power supply it powers on starts fan, flashes some status lights and reboots over and over. Bad board?

[ajkula66]

Bad board?

Check if the pins are exposed and/or touching one another/ground on all USB ports.

[sktn77a]

Can you connect an external monitor to the RGB port to see what's going on?

[Medessec]

You have speakers plugged in? The machine could be powering off with a video error and could be trying to beep a code at you. Although boot looping on Thinkpad boards is very bad in my experience... but I second sktn77a's idea of trying to get something off an external monitor if possible as well.


However- Thinkpad T400 discrete GPU= ATI 3470, not NVIDIA. So... what board exactly do you have here?