Dell :: On The 9400/E1705 How Can You Tell If Its The Motherboard Or Video Card ?

I got a Dell Inspiron 9400/E1705 here that will not boot. The owner said he put into hibernate and went home, when he came in and turned it back on it was sluggish for about 10 minutes, he powered it off and then it would not power back up.

When you turn on the power the power and HD lights come on, you hear what sounds like the HD doing some movement and then it shuts down in a few seconds.

I removed the HD, ram, dvd, wifi, modem and tested it with same results. Also took out the CMOS battery to try to reset the BIOS and put it all back together and same thing.

CPU fan does not spin at all on power up, not sure if this model is supposed to do that little 5 second thing most of them do.

No beeps, nothing on the screen, etc.

Is there a way to determine if its the motherboard OR the video card, as this has a discrete video card, not integrated. Would you get any kind of system response if the video card was dead but the motherboard/cpu was ok ?. I would rather replace one and not both if I can tell which to go after first.

thanks for any ideas or advice.