u/Ascalion

I pulled out an old motherboard of mine that I replaced with the same model to try and fix it now that I've got better equipment. I've identified that the BIOS wasn't getting the necessary 1.8V to work, so it was stuck at one of the earliest stages of boot (confirmed by the CPU LED boot light). After testing and finding a missing SOT-32 part which I assume got removed years ago when I removed the x16 PCI slot because it had burned up, this might be the cause. I externally injected 1.8V into the BIOS pin 8 that was reading only 0.7v before, and the computer proceeded to boot into BIOS normally, I was able to see the CPU, RAM, etc and navigate it fine with a video card plugged in.

So now I think I need to replace these two SOT-32 parts in the circuit, to restore its ability to boot by itself. I've tried searching the markings, but I'm getting way too many results, I'm not sure how to narrow it down. Are these common parts on all motherboards? I was lucky enough to have the same working board already still, so I found that they were 22 | 37 and 2U | 47.

Both have similar readings where pin 3 (the one opposite the other two) is at 1.8V already, then pin 2 (originally read 0.7, and is connected to pin 8 of the BIOS chip), and pin 1 is always close to 0.

When the external 1.8V is injected, pin 2 raises to 1.8V as well on both.

Here is a microscope image of the faulty one and a picture of the currently working one in my computer. How would I go about searching exactly what they are and finding replacements? Thanks in advance for any help.

https://imgur.com/a/NvcnIWq

Board: MSI B450 Tomahawk non-MAX

BIOS flash: MX25U12873F 1.8V

u/Ascalion — 21 days ago