another great idea gone bad

here we go, looking for guidance. thought i'd assemble my own comp. sounded good on paper. bought case, 350w supply, asus a7n8xe deluxe board, amd athlon 2800+ cpu w/fan and heatsink, maxtor 120gb hd w/sata, agp geforce card, tdk cd-rw, ultra 512mb ddr3200 mem. already had mouse, lcd display, keyboard. here's the problem. assembled components, set all jumpers, checked and double checked. can get into bios settings fine. hdd and cd drive are found. tried running maxtor partitioning software. comp kept shutting down. finally this morning i got drive partitioned. tried to load windows xp. comp keeps shutting down. no warning, no nothing. have to turn off pwr. supply switch before it will re-boot. have only vital components hooked up. cd will start to load win xp and then comp. will shut down. looked at hardware monitor in bios screen, voltages seem in tolerance, cpu temp around 130 degrees f. am going to call asus tomorrow for some tech support as they are closed today for 4th of july. i have read motherboard book and tried different setting until i'm blue in the face. any suggestions besides a sledge hammer? one parting note, on bootup, screen only shows 128mb ram. have tried mem stick in all 3 dimm slots. thanks in advance for reading my rant. excuse me now while i fire up my incinerator.

 

130 F shouldnt be bad (about 54 C)... but the problem you are describing sounds an awful lot like overheating...

when you say you set all the jumpers... what exactly did you change? the A7N8X-E Deluxe only has 1 or 2 jumpers that you would ever touch, and usually leaving them at default is fine.

be sure to check your BIOS hardware monitor and make the shutdown temperature something like 65 C or so... you shouldnt ever be that hight if you correctly applied the heatsink/Fan

by the way, are you using a stock heatsink fan approved by AMD or did you buy your own... and if so which one?

and when you say it only shows 128MB RAM... you sure thats not the video card information flashing really quickly before the system POST? during POST it should display the correct amount of RAM in bytes, not MB.

 

the fan i am using is a speez socket A fan that is capable up to and beyond my cpu. i see nothing that will let me change shutdown temp., only monitor it. when i said i set jumpers, i guess what i really meant is i checked them. only one i changed offhand is keyboard wake-up. you are probably right on the mem count. i have a 128mB agp card. when i go into bios it shows:
base memory 640k
extended memory 523264k
total memory 524288k
guess memory is ok after all. my personal guess is lousy power supply on shutdown problem. i'll see if anyone else has seen this. thanks.

 

another thing to check...

be sure that the motherboard is not coming in contact with the case at all. If it is not seated securely on the standoffs (those little pegs you mount it on) it could be shorting out with the metal case... which would not only make you restart, but could damage hardware as well.

just a heads up, as sometimes its simple things like that that cause problems.

 

Hi,
oldguy, try this, http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/

It should give you an idea if your power suply is man enough for the job.