Death of a motherboard?

[tcn]

Hi,

I am hoping to get some insight from someone who would have had a similar experience.

The situation is the following:
We have a computer that has been working for quite a while. Low power i3 3GHz, nothing fancy. One day it never came back from sleep, the motherboard seemed dead.

Thinking of a power glitch, I changed the motherboard, the power supply (Corsair 430W) and the power bar (APC). The motherboard is a Gigabyte H61-USB3 mini ITX; no card is inserted in the PCIe slot; video comes from the i3.

The computer died again about 4 hours after the switch. If power is applied to the board, LEDs are not turning on (well, slight single blink when power is applied showing the PSU is doing its job) but nothing else.

I am trying to figure out how this could be possible. USB ports are full (except 3.0 ports) but that is it.

Could a power surge do this? Go through power bar and PSU to hit the motherboard this hard? The scanner (old HP SCSI scanner) is still alive and well and is plugged to the very same outlet.

Could it be the CPU? (only thing left to change)

tcn

[profJim]

Remove the motherboard from the computer case and place the board on a cardboard box beside the case.
Remove all hardware that isn't required for booting into the bios using:

• cpu and heatsink with fan
• case speaker connected to the motherboard
• 1 memory module
• keyboard (PS/2 model if possible)
• graphics card connected to a monitor

If you can boot repeatedly into the bios after powering off, add one component at a time and boot back into the bios.
This should help find which components are causing the problem.

A cpu failure is possible but they seldom fail.
You might need to test with another power supply, graphics card, or other hardware.

[tcn]

I'm sorry but I'm far beyond this point. As I said, LEDs are faintly lighting once (on for a fraction of a second and then off like a switch you turn on and turn off right away) saying that power is going to the motherboard.

It won't post and the motherboard has CPU, memory on it (H61 using i3's video processor). It is already bare.

I'm looking for the root cause; the mobo is dead.