Mobo Upgrade Weirdness

[dadx2mj]

Hello everybody, a buddy of mine decided to upgrade his mobo he picked up an MSI K7N2 mobo with the Nforce2 chipset. He bought it used from a friend of his. So he brings his rig and new mobo to my place to do the upgrade. We move everything to new mobo and try to boot up but get nothing. The fans spin but that is about it no beep no video out nothing. We do all the normal re-seating, clearing of CMOS and even tried booting with the mobo out of the case laying on the anti static bag but get nothing more than the fans spinning up. So it is late he says we'll try again tomorrow. So this morning he calls me up and says screw it I am going to Fry's to buy a new mobo. He goes and buys the exact same one brings it to my place we move everything over to it and get the same results. At this point I think the cpu has to be damaged somehow so we put it all back on his old Epox and it fires right up and boots no problem. So now we know the ram, cpu, and vid card are all good and working. So one more time back onto the new MSI mobo and once again nothing but the fans spinning up. CPU is a TBred 2400+ ram is HyperX PC 2700 vid card is a Gainward GF3. Anyone know of any issues with this set up or did he just get incredibly unlucky and get two bad mobo's in a row?

[eGoCeNTRoNiX]

Does the mobo have a sensor that won't fire it up if the HSF isn't plugged into the right port? I'm sure you already thought of that.. But it's a shot.. I guess.. GL eGo

[dadx2mj]

Yeah we thought about that. He has a Tornado on his AX7 it is powered off of a 4 pin connector but has the speed sensing lead hooked to the cpu fan header on the mobo. Thanks for the reply tho.

[FlyingPenguin]

Real stretch, but maybe the PSU is borderline and the newer boards don't like the voltages.

[dadx2mj]

Originally posted by FlyingPenguin
Real stretch, but maybe the PSU is borderline and the newer boards don't like the voltages.

You might be onto something there. This is why....he has an Enermax 431watt PS and supposedly it had some issues with the Epox mobo he had. So he opened up the power supply and did some mod to it involving installing a pot to adjust output voltage. First thing he did when we were doing the upgrade was open up the PS and turn the pot back down to lower the voltage. I argued with him when he did it but it is his system and thus his call but I bet that might just be the problem.

[FlyingPenguin]

Unless you calibrate those voltages with a digital meter (you can't trust the voltages BIOS reports) they could be WAYY off.

Voltages on the 5, 12 and 3.3 volt buses should be no more than 5% off.

You got a good PSU you can test the new boards with?

[FlyingPenguin]

Unless you calibrate those voltages with a digital meter (you can't trust the voltages BIOS reports) they could be WAYY off.

Voltages on the 5, 12 and 3.3 volt buses should be no more than 5% off.

Also is the PSU certified for AMD/P4 (also known as ATX 2.0)? Older mobos can manger with older design PSUs, but the modern mobos draw more current.

You got a good PSU you can test the new boards with?

[wvjohn]

ps sounds likely, also i read somewhere that the nforce boards may use the same pool of electricity for both the cpu and the ran, therefore if you jack one up the other may suffer - also. this newfangled ram takes a lot more juice than the old stuff, if you've got a marginal ps that may be adding to the problemo

like fp says, swap it out with a know good ps

[dadx2mj]

Thanks for the help guys. This guy works some strange hours and his computer is sitting her so it looks like it will be Friday when we can get together with a spare power supply he has to see what that will do. I'll post back then with the results. Thanks Again!!!!

[Lmandrake]

I once had a board I couldn't get to boot and it turned out to be tarnished contacts on a memory stick. A couple of passes with an eraser cleaned it up and the machine booted right up.