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Ok, so here's the story on the 8200 motherboard.
I posted to the Dell Community Support Forums and I quickly got some informative replies.
A useful resource, although I still think it's a shame we have all these discussion groups scattered across so many different websites, rather than a central USENET2 where you could find everything.
My thread: Dell 8200 motherboard.
Another one they pointed me to: 8200 motherboard upgrade, what's a 7G535 motherboard

According to them, the 7G535 motherboard being sold on eBay is the original 400MHz FSB model, regardless of what people say. So it should be fine with my CPU and RAM.

I also went through the Dell troubleshooting with a nice helpful guy from India.
Usual stuff with reseating all cables, reseating CPU, removing all add-ons and cables.
Only scenario I hadn't thought of was a partial failure of the power supply, but I checked with an identical working one and the motherboard is still dead.

The motherboard has only a few ways that it can communicate with you.
There is the colour of the light on the power button in front, and there are four small LEDs, ABCD on the back. Unfortunately the light is orange and none of the LEDs are lit.

I'm going to call Dell spare parts Canada, the number is 1-866-440-3355, they're only open M-F 8-8 EST.

Another option would be to buy an entire used 8200 on eBay, they only run about $400 now. posted by Richard at 09:21 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)