Have been having a look at a PC for a nursey friend of mine.The original error was a rattling sound in the tower.I took off the side and found the fan for the processor had fell off.On further inspect i had found that the reason for the fan falling off was the fan retaining bracket ,a small tab had snapped off.You use these tabs to attach the fan bracket onto the motherboard.This is a socket AM2. The lady had been using the pc even with the fan hanging off,and it had worked for sometime.She was not to know the fan had fell off inside. Problem is now when you power on the PC you just get a RED boot light but then it freezes.I can buy a new chip ,it is a athlon 64 x2 4000.Only trouble is could it be the motherboard,or does it sound like the chip has fried.???? Help apprecited.
Does the machine give a post beep initially when you power on the machine? There is a very high change and I bet that something else was damaged while it was running other than the CPU. What do you mean? Are you referring to your power LED light? Or does the display just shows a solid red screen? What does the display show when it locks up? The best approach would be to take it to a local pc repair shop (or a friends house that has an AM2 chip) and see if they can post the machine with a working AM2 cpu. If so your in luck. But keep in mind you may have problems down the road, or just an unstable and unpredictable machine. If the board is bad, and there is no burnt marks on the motherboard, there may be a chance you can RMA the board with if it's less than 3 years old depending on the manufacture.
