About a week ago my computer shut down unexpectedly. When I tried to power it up again the power supply would start up the fans for a moment but shortly after it would shut down again. I trouble shot that problem and eventually decided to replace a bulging cap on my motherboard and that brings me to where I am now.
After replacing the capacitor my system starts up with all my hardware connected (2 sata hd's, 2x512 geil mem, geforce 6600 card, ide cdrom) I get a correct POST beep but no video signal.
I've tried reseating the memory and video card several times as well as trying all combinations of using one and both sticks of memory. I have cleared the cmos and tried to start up without a drive connected but nothing has changed.
A couple observations: the video card gets hot after running for awhile, while I don't notice any change in the cpu's heat sink. The chipset heatset also gets extremely hot. I'm not sure if this means anything about where I may be stuck.
I guess I'm just looking for some advice as to what to try/replace next. The motherboard is of the Asus socket 939 AMD variety.
Bulging caps could mean that the power supply is not putting the correct voltages out... or that it's putting an excessive hf ripple on the dc lines because of failing caps in the PSU itself, but some caps do just go like that through ageing, these things as you know are polarised and should be inserted the correct way round.
We really need to concentrate on the bare essentials here the first goal is getting bios post with video, you'll get this with just the RAM, Graphic card and CPU only the rest can be disconnected, even with just these you'll get a message something like "Please insert the operating system disc" or "Hard drive not found" and be able to enter bios set up when these are working.
Normally I would suggest starting with the power supply unit (PSU), I do think the best bet is to try the video card first in another computer we're not concernd about the correct drivers we just wanna know if it works. I suggested this because you gave no further clues and that I assume that everything was fine apart from no video.... a video card can cause boot up problems.
No harm in trying another power supply.... but I'd refrain from trying the suspect power unit elsewhere incase there 'is' something wrong with it, we can't gamble on blowing another mobo should it be faulty.
Yep chips do run warm but you made it sound excessive in which case it's a gamble whether to replace the power supply and graphic card, as it could easily be the mobo as well - especially if the PSU wasn't regulating, we do have to make a start somewhere though.
Corrupt bios could create problems so somewhere along the way it may be wise to try and reboot it by removing the battery for about three minutes.
POST passed, no video 
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