Boot problems on new motherboard

*cough*Ok, so, story time......

Two days ago my house was struck by lightning. My computer was on a surge protector, but surprise surprise, I could no longer turn it on afterwards. it seems the surge came through the cable line, as our cable box was completely fried. Fortunately, I had an old PSU that was not plugged into anything at the time; so I quickly swapped my PSU out and tested the working PSU: no response. Not even a power indicator on the motherboard. Because this was the only 775 motherboard I had, I couldn't test any of my other components. So I went on newegg and got a replacement so I could test the other components.

It came today and I swapped everything out and wired everything together only to have it power up long enough to get into the BIOS then turn off completely. Further testing showed that the amount of time I could nurse out of my new motherboard was inversely proportional to the amount of time it was off. If I turned it back on directly after it died, it would die even before the monitor had time to turn on; if I left it off for 5 or so minutes, I could manage to get into the BIOS.

My motherboard has LED boot debugging, and I've seen it get past the RAM check, so I'm fairly certain that my RAM is still viable.

My question is, does this sound like damage to my CPU from the lightning strike? Or is this possibly just an unlucky bad motherboard?

Ah, I think this is a brand independent problem, but here are my stats just in case:


MOBO: DFI Lanparty LT X48
CPU: Intel Q9450 Yorkfield
RAM: OCZ 4G ReaperX DDR2 800
PSU: CORSAIR CMPSU-1000HX

 

http://us.dfi.com.tw/Product/xx_pro...p?PRODUCT_ID=5917&CATEGORY_TYPE=LP LT&SITE=US

That your mobo? I had the X38 for a while then sold it to a friend who drooled over it.

1. Make sure there's no extra standoff on the mobo tray. It may short out the mobo.

2. Triple-check your connections. Are these connected:

24-pin mobo power
8-pin cpu power
CPU fan

3. Do NOT connect the extra floppy drive type connector on the mobo.

4. If you're using the stock intel cpu fan, double check the seating. The push-pins may not be fully inserted.

5. Clear cmos. It make take 1 hour to overnight. You got nothing to lose since it's off at night.

6. Try each stick of ram in each slot, upon post, go to bios, load defaults, save & exit. Do it fast. Don't bother with setting up time & boot order.

So the only new part is the mobo? Try the other psu. Lug it to a friend's who can borrow you some compatible parts. However, this time, you use one of your parts in his working pc.

P.S. Print out the post codes for the LED:

http://www.csd.dficlub.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-1167.html

 

Thank you very much, I will try all of those suggestions once I get home tonight; as to your last point. The comp shuts down at different times, depending how long it's been without a charge, so the code changes accordingly. I don't think theres any one step that trips it up, since I've seen it get to 96 (last step in boot), then only up to C1 (memory test).