PCA Forums

Decide to go to Intel from AMD. Purchase Asus P5K-E 775 mainboard, 2gigs OCZ PC6400 from the egg, one E2160 CPU from club it.

Assemble system. No beeps, no boot. Remove, reinstall all, reseat all. No beeps, no boot. Try stick of Micron, get beeps saying no VGA. Pull old nvidia card, replace with new x1950pro. Boots into Bios. Replace Micron ram with OCZ, boots into bios.

Hook up IDE hard and SATA hard drives. No boot, no beeps.
Disconnect IDE hard drives and SATA hard drives. No boot, no beeps.

Put Micron stick back in, beeps to say no VGA. Pull and reseat X1950pro.
System boots, then screen goes to black before I can reach bios settings.

Power Supply is 500 watts, was good PS on previous version of system.
There are no fans attached to any motherboard fan headers
Floppy drive, hard drives, nvidia video card are "known good" units.
New board was pulled and replaced after first failed boot to make sure no extra standoffs, other sources of shorts.

Cooling is danger den h20 block secured by 4 6-32 bolts passing through mainboard mounting holes and screwed into case board tray. mobo is supported under socket by nylon spacer between back of board and case mainboard tray.

Now let's play Jeopardy - use the poll to select an answer. The category is, of course: New Builds That Won't Boot and the selections are framed in the form of a question.

Selected the wrong one. Meant to select motherboard.

Could really be a lot of things. You need to swap out the PSU at some point just to eliminate it.

Off hand though it sounds like a crack in the main board or, possibly, something touching the board and shorting it out. Pull the board and set it up outside the case with just the PSU, video and one stick of RAM connected. Use a screw driver to short the power switch pins to turn it on. See if it behaves.

Also pull the CPU & reseat it in the socket. I've seen many cases where the CPU for some reason (even if it looks like it) is not fully seated or making good contact.

Hope this helps.

I feel your pain. This is why I bought a Dell last time around. I'm sick of playing Russian Roulette with a new rig. I need it to work out of the box. I'm over saving a couple of hundred bucks just to trade it for a lot of aggravation I don't need. I spend the whole day fixing other peoples computers so it's no fun fixing my own anymore.

My first suggestion was gonna be PSU.

what fp said - put the mobo on a cardboard box and see if it will do anything....

reset the bios on the mobo - clears cmos pull battery out -

burn incense - chant

good luck