Discussion Motherboard not booting

[SeaZz]

A friend of mine years ago bought a new motherboard for his system , he built it himself ,everything worked great for just a day . He left the pc powered on downloading a game and left the house , when he got back the pc was off , he tried to boot it and nothing happened . So he took the pc to a "repair shop" in which the guy there said that the motherboard was dead by the onboard ethernet. In my 10+ years of experience on computers , i've never heard of a motherboard being fried by the ethernet port. His router still works all these years btw , he just uses wifi after that incident . That's the whole backstory . Few days ago he found the motherboard in his basement and wanted to throw it in the trash , so i thought i'll give it a chance and if it works i'll build a media server. After close inspection of the motherboard i saw nothing weird on it , except one thing. The cpu retainer was missing , so i asked him why on earth is the cpu retainer removed. Back in the day when he built the pc, he removed the cpu retainer because his air cooler was interfering with it (sounds weird i know). The cpu was only held in place by the air cooler. So maaaybe the pressure wasn't enough for the cpu to make good contact with the socket? That's why i want to give it a shot , with the retainer on the motherboard this time.
The motherboard for those who wonder is a Gigabyte GA-H61M-S1 (rev 3.0) . 1155 socket DDR3 , perfect for a media server or maybe a second PC
I'm about to order a cpu from ebay just for testing it out. What do you guys think , should i give it a go , or listen to the "expert repair shop" and throw the motherboard in trash?

 

[Shjacks55]

A customer had ethernet cable running between 2 industrial buildings and equipment damaged by lightning surge.

 

[Shjacks55]

Ethernet typically uses transformer input and output to cable. Consumer grade typ 350 volts isolation to line, so except for static/lightning can't see how ethernet fried the motherboard. Reliabiliy(MTBF) curve shows high "infant mortality" then drop then slowly increasing failure curve. For reliability, we used to do a 72- hour burn-in thoroughly test all parts at max temp. The first 72 hour was where most early failures occur. Currently systems (incl MBs) are never tested before you receive them. Even if it "works," will that expansion slot you try to use 6 mo from now?