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it's probably a busted motherboard

haha i used to work at UMart back in 2007 for a 6 week stint while their usual warranty clerk was on holiday back in china... failing motherboards was pretty common... there is also it could be the PSU is not feeding enough power through because it's faulty also

if the shop is decent they have a whole set of known good components to pair it with and will isolation test all of the parts and identify which component is broken

it can even be a dead cpu, that happens sometimes too, but the motherboards are probably the most complex and most likely therefore to fail

Mike Dilger ☑️ 11mo ago

Yes the motherboard is a good guess. I don't know why motherboards are still so fragile. Why can't they make circuits that are embedded deep inside a metal heatsink with no exposed fragile bits? You'd be able to play football with something like that without damaging it.

CPUs tend to not be dead because as higher value products they get a lot of testing, also they have to be tested in order to classify which model they are (they make them all the same, and then via testing decide which cores to keep and which fuses to blow). They are also packaged very well and in general are kinda hard to fry these days even when not cooling them properly.

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ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 11mo ago

they sure aren't as fragile as they used to be, it's just the sheer number of components, and the nature of statistical sampling used to test stuff

the failure rates can be reduced by testing a larger number of the production batch but in doing so you have to raise the cost, because very often the tests are destructive

the same thing with CPUs, they actually just make a batch of chips, test them at baseline, and then escalate until the failure rate passes a percentage and they clock the whole batch at that same speed they got the less-than-target failure rate on

so, i'm sure you can see the combinatorial problem of the thousands of components in a CPU, if the chances are that 0.001% for each component to fail it doesn't take many pieces until you have a high probability