P43DE3 was irratic. Now boot looping aftr bios rld

Have had a P43DE3 running OK for years.  Always had issues with no HD sound from the vid card and took 2-3 reboots and it would just work.  Because it stays running most of the time, I just lived with it. 

FF to now, machine started acting up.  Inet windows froze solid, including cursor.  Vid glitches, streaks, etc.  Testing was pointing to a vid card but new card fixed nothing.  Machine would auto restart itself several times during boot, sometimes finally booting to windows, sometimes not. 

Finally, everything but the mobo was disconnected to isolate mobo issues and was determined the mobo was not stable.  Even though the bios was the latest 1.50, we decided to attempt reloading the bios as a last ditch effort.  Probably should have tested more before doing that.  Now the mobo is just boot looping and will not boot at all. 

I have yet to see if we can get a bios chip or if that is even worth while?  These boards are hard to find and we don't want to go for a full rebuild right now.  Never had these issues with an Asus.  Frustrated. 

From my electronic experience, I am wondering if there are any caps on the board that are likely to cause this and need replaced?  I see caps fail all the time, causing all sorts of odd issues due to dirty power. 

We did not swap in another PSU because all bios voltages were shown good when we were able to access it.  There were not enough indications but maybe we should have tried that. 


Are there any lights or beepers on the board to show faults? 

I have become rather seasoned in cap replacement.  Even got me a nice ESR meter, etc, since I seem to be chasing them in industrial circuits. 

Do you have ideas on how to recover my mobo as it is now so I can do more testing?  Can I get a bios chip or another work around to get the bios loaded up? 


Edited by fastline - 03 Jan 2017 at 11:34am

Back in the day I used this Co. twice while salvaging boards:

http://www.badcaps.net/