Testing a suspect mobo delivery

[ajones]

I think someone upstairs doesn't like me.... By the time I get this PC working, I'll be on holiday and unable to use the thing!

New mobo delivered and some damaged spotted on the board. It's an ASUS P5E-VM HDMI and as soon as I work out how to import pictures, I'll post one!

It looks like the area of the mobo beside the PCI slot has been knocked; The Firewire header pins are pushed inwards a little, as well as a capacitor next to it. Whilst both pins to the cap are still connected to the mobo (no damage visible on the board), one of the pins is clearly visible.

A couple of questions:

I've been adivsed by Scan tech support to test it, but how? Should I build up the pc with the mobo including the processor, RAM, video card etc?
If everything goes fubar and I blow something, will Scan cover the cost of those components?

Cheers in advance!

[ajones]

Hopefully this linky will work!

[Madafwo]

If anything were to blow it would be covered under the warranty.

Just build the system up with the basics. CPU, Memory and PSU. If it posts then the board is working, you can then go on and build it up a bit further, maybe even do an install of windows on it and run Prime95, or even before that run memtest.

[smargh]

I wouldn't use that board at all - the solder should have been sufficient to keep the cap in place. I dunno how solid caps are actually manufacturered, but I don't thnk it will have actually moved the solder - won't the pin within the cap actually have moved down? That can't be a good thing...

[ajones]

I wouldn't use that board at all - the solder should have been sufficient to keep the cap in place. I dunno how solid caps are actually manufacturered, but I don't thnk it will have actually moved the solder - won't the pin within the cap actually have moved down? That can't be a good thing...

I see your point, but:

a) The man from Scan said "test it" and I can't see anyway of doing that without populating it and supplying go-go juice
b) Aren't caps made containing layers of paper and dielctric gel? I'm thinking that it'll still work as a capacitor, but with reduced efficiency

[Agent]

Return it - you don't know what non visible / noticeable damage may have been done too.

[TAKTAK]

Return it - you don't know what non visible / noticeable damage may have been done too.

+1 to that...

you could find that there is an invisible underlying problem...

[Mitch92uK]

Definitely return it ... that's had some force to pull the cap out like that.

[ajones]

Just an update:

Having spoken to Scan tech support again, I'm arranging to have this mobo returned. Now that I've populated the board, I'm having some niggling problems with windows.... Now this could be due to it being a decade since my last Intel installation, but some updates are failing due to services and components "not responding" which makes me think that the dodgy cap is causing some instabilities in the hardware.

Thanks for your input folks!