Hey everyone.

I recently got a computer back a few days ago that I gave away to a friend in need, and it came back in non working order.

I'm positive the mobo is the problem for obvious reasons, but I would like to know how something like this would happen.

The following are a few pictures of pics I found around the net, not the actual mobo I have now.

This is a picture of the general location of the little black boxes



Here is a picture of the one with the major damage. All three of the boxes have damage, but this one is very melted and enlarged.



Here is a picture of supposedly the same model, w/o any little black boxes though.



Could anyone please tell me how these things burnt up / melted? If it's at all possible to tell from a picture, what exactly do those little guys do?

I had the comp for maybe four years and had no issues until I gave it away.


I'm purchasing a new mobo soon anyway, just thought it might be interesting to find out any info on those little boxes.

Thanks for any info you can provide to me!

Edit: The board is a P4MA Pro if that helps.

Sorry if this seems a cop-out, but this board has a 20-pin power connector, meaning it is ancient, and uses a VIA chipset, meaning it was crap when it was made. Any further effort is best spent elsewhere. But anyway, those little black things are probably rectifiers. Hard to say what killed them, but it probably involved an overload of some kind.

Yeah, I realize this board is rather old, I am the one who bought it after all. I bought it back in ?2003? from some cheap-o PC store. The only thing that is still living out of all the parts the complete setup came with is the CPU. Everything else was replaced with something better, lol.

I agree with VIA being huge POS, I've seen 4 now and they have always broken down.

I know one of the boxes near the smaller boxes is a rectifier, just wondering what the smaller ones were.

I'm not really looking to salvage the board or anything. I guess I'm just bored and couldn't think of anything better to do than try to find out what those things are.

It sucks being hung over, it makes ponder about crap that I wouldn't normally care about!

Thanks for teh reply though, I appreciate it.