Odd motherboard (??) issue

2025-04-16

So, I've been building my own pc's for a good while now, every time with a pretty good success rate. Unfortunately, this last week's adventure didn't turn out so hot, however. Maybe I'm missing something somewhere, or maybe, somehow I screwed it up. At this point, I'm not sure, but I'll let those who might have run into this before voice in before completely giving up.

The board: ASRock 775V88 ATX
The CPU: intel Pentium 4 540J Prescott 800MHz FSB LGA 775

Going through and setting this thing up was a rather large pain in the tail end, and, something, somehow went wrong. Originally I planned to put in a thermaltake Heatsink, but couldn't get the thing to tighten up (the heatsink kept jumping around while I was trying to tighten the screws), so I went back to the original Intel heatsink w/ arctic silver.

Anyways, on to the issue
For hours, this thing wouldn't boot, no matter what PS I tried, what combination I tried, what jumper setting I tried, it just wouldn't. Then, all of the sudden, it actually lit up and booted. When it did, I noticed that from the corner of the board, a bit of black smoke was coming up. Not from the CPU side of things, from the opposite side of the board. On seeing that , I cut the power instantly.

What is happening now is beyond odd, however. When I fire up the board, everything looks like it's booting up just normally. Every fan will startup, every drive will go through the init process, everything, down to the IDE lan will actually LOOK like it's working. The problem? I'm getting no video signal whatsoever.

At first I thought this was due to the AGP card (the board didn't recommend using 3.3v cards for some reason, and I don't have my manual handy, so I can't recall WHAT voltage mine is), so I went out and picked up an IDE card. Same result, absolutely nothing, the monitor just is not sync'ing to the card at all.

Has anyone else run across this, maybe not with this specific combination , but somehow , somewhere? And if so, how did you solve it? I'm not 100% certain that EITHER the CPU OR the board itself are damaged by what I saw earlier, as, if either were, one would think that the board wouldn't even fire up at all. However, I'm not counting either of those out, either.