Identification of Hardware Damage

Most of the time, when a motherboard is dead, the problem is in the voltage regulator section that creates the CPU core voltage.

Look for burnt, bulged or discolored parts near the CPU socket.

The second form of damage is from lightning and static electricity.

There is often no physical evidence of the damage.

A POST card may or may not help verify that the board is bad.

For CPUs, there are only 2 options:

Try the suspect CPU in a known good motherboard.

Try a known good CPU in the suspect motherboard.

Unfortunately, either way there is some risk of damaging the known good part if the suspect part is bad and has a very catastrophic failure.

Chas