Lorenz0_o

Good day everyone! I recently bought an Asus G750 JX from eBay labeled as "untested." As I'm cautious with such devices, I first set it up. It turned out that someone had already tinkered with the device, and quite unprofessionally at that. When I removed the graphics card (mxm gtx 770m), I noticed that the previous owner had attempted to replace the thermal paste on the CPU and GPU and failed. The GPU was very dirty with many fingerprints of thermal paste on the heatsink. When I took it apart, it turned out that the person had replaced all thermal pads with thermal paste (unbelievable mess ). After thorough cleaning, I noticed that an SMD resistor was broken off due to the previous owner's professional work. Now, I finally get to my question... Since the graphics card has a missing resistor and I can't determine exactly which one it is, I thought it might be possible to operate the laptop without the GPU. I reassembled the laptop properly and turned it on. However, when I pressed the power button, I got a black screen, and the fans spun at full speed. To check if it might be a motherboard issue, I removed both RAM modules to provoke an error, but the result was the same without the error (no POST accordingly). Everything else has been removed from the device (HDD, ODD, keyboard, WLAN, battery... everything it doesn't need). Is a graphics card necessary for this model to function, or is the motherboard defective? If anyone has insights or suggestions on how to resolve this problem, I would greatly appreciate your help. Thank you in advance for any helpful responses!