On the 9400/E1705 how can you tell if its the motherboard or video card ?

I got a Dell Inspiron 9400/E1705 here that will not boot. The owner said he put into hibernate and went home, when he came in and turned it back on it was sluggish for about 10 minutes, he powered it off and then it would not power back up.

When you turn on the power the power and HD lights come on, you hear what sounds like the HD doing some movement and then it shuts down in a few seconds.

I removed the HD, ram, dvd, wifi, modem and tested it with same results. Also took out the CMOS battery to try to reset the BIOS and put it all back together and same thing.

CPU fan does not spin at all on power up, not sure if this model is supposed to do that little 5 second thing most of them do.

No beeps, nothing on the screen, etc.

Is there a way to determine if its the motherboard OR the video card, as this has a discrete video card, not integrated. Would you get any kind of system response if the video card was dead but the motherboard/cpu was ok ?. I would rather replace one and not both if I can tell which to go after first.

thanks for any ideas or advice.

 

Dell diagnostics? (F12 at system startup or the Drivers and Resources DVD/CD) That should let you know fairly quickly. You'll need the HD in to get it to run by using the F12 method.

 

We dont even get that far. Nothing comes up so we cant do any diags.

 

even with a bad GPU the laptop would most likely still boot up.

You way as well try re-seating the CPU, and I have to ask you tested it with at least one ram stick in it right ?

 

Did just about everything. With and without ram, removed all components, stripped it down and reseated the CPU and GPU (card, if we can call it that) , even put a 9volt battery on the fan connector (unplugged from the mobo) and the fan spun up perfectly several times, spins freely and vents are clear so I dont think the machine is not powering up due to dead fan.

On a FN+POWER I get num+asc+scroll lock lights all on solid but if I pull the ram I get num lock on solid but asc and scroll lights blinking. So something on the machine is still "thinking" but cant tell what.

Battery is fully charged so I dont think its a faulty AC adapter not putting out enough voltage.

I was looking at the 9400 mobo and I see the cpu and next to it something that looks like a typical graphics chip, even though there is also the big discrete video "card" that plugs into the PCI connector. I also noticed a big INTEL chip under the card.

So I am wondering if the big chip next to the cpu is actually just some kind of generic onboard video because I think the big Intel chip is the chipset. Not sure but was wondering what each was.

I am leaning towards a bad mobo, but just wish I could tell if I would get anything on powerup if the graphics were bad and not the mobo or CPU.

 

The Intel chip is the northbridge or southbridge. 9400 with GPU do not have built-in graphics.
Try turning on with the graphics card unplugged. If the system starts (CPU fan turn, BIOS beep) it's the graphics card. If not, it's the motherboard.