Dead Motherboard

Good day ladies and gents, I come hat in hand looking for an answer to a rather perplexing and aggrevating situation. I just built a new computer to replace my 5 year old dinosaur(amd athlon, agp, crt, etc.). Unfortunately, my childlike glee of having a new computer turned sour when I could not get said computer to post.

q6600
msi p7n sli platinum
4gb ocz sli ready
2x 9600 gt
ultra 700 watt modular psu
benq 2400w lcd
150gb raptor
samsung dvd-rw

I believe I have tried everything known to humanity to get this new build working. Heatsink fan, 2 case fans and gpu fans work upon power up. The monitor reads "no signal detected". I first built everything inside the case, when this did not work, I built the computer out of the case. Tried 1 stick of ram, 1 gpu, cpu/heatsink with no noticible change. I tried reseating ram and gpus. I swapped out a stick of ram and then I swapped out gpus. Still nothing. My old crt from my last computer still works, but would not display on the new computer(both crt and lcd display "no signal detected" and then go into sleep mode). I have pulled the mobo battery and tried the cmos reset button on the mobo. The dvd-rw has power and can open/close when powered on. I cannot tell/hear if the hard drive is on, as the 6 fans(psu, case, heatsink, gpus) make it rather loud.

At this point I'm not sure what else to do. Is it time to rma the mobo? As I am switching over from amd/agp, I have no way of testing anything in this build save the monitor. It would seem that the mobo is the culprit here, is there a chance it is the cpu or psu? With all the fans and drives working, it appears to me that the psu is not at fault. Am I correct in this assumption? I left the computer running for 1-2 minutes, hoping the computer would realize the anguish it was putting me through and decide to work, but alas it would not. However after this, I noticed the heatsink was warmish which led me to believe it was not the cpu. I don't have any speakers and there are no audible beeps with zero, one or two sticks of ram. What are the chances both sticks of memory are faulty? I believe this further backs up my theory of a dead motherboard. True? Any suggestions, advice, words of wisdom would be sincerely appreciated. Thank you for your time.

Best wishes,

Bear

 

Ok, problem here is not your mobo, it is your GPU's, the 9600GT's are a very poorly made card. Google these cards, almost all the problems related to this card turns out this very same problem, "Screen goes black/sleep mode" but everything else keeps running.

I know it would be rare to have 2 DOA cards, but it happens, I think that chance increases with this card alone because of all the problems this model has. I would trying returning them and get something different, they really aren't worth the hassle in my opinion.

EDIT: Actually read this, this forum topic is 11 pages full of problems with this model. http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=60826

 

Aside from the graphics problems mentioned previous, the most common problems I have run into when Building a new pc are with the jumper settings of the drives (if they are IDE type any way) and the hooking up of the case connections. Assuming you have sata drives I'll do the case connection tutorial. If its a switch (power/reset) its only a break in the line so you can't hook it up wrong, it can go on any way. If its a component (HDD Led/ Power Led/Speaker etc.) it must go on in the correct polarity (+ to + and - to -). Getting one of these wrong will have varing degrees of problems associated with it depending on what other circuits are affected by the reversed polarity.

Another problem that is very hard to diagnose is putting a metal stand-off for mounting the mobo where one is not needed. Mobo boards are made with standard holes before the engineers design the board around it, so that there can be mounting holes that are not meant to be used. A good way to tell is if there is a star shaped design of solder around the hole it is mean to act as a ground and a screw will not cause problems there. If there is no solder then a mount beneath that hole maybe grounding out the board and preventing it from working. Abit is notorious for this but you will not find them admitting to it you would have to find out about it thru the forums.

If your drive is IDE for some ungodly reason, remember that master jumpered drives should be connected to the terminating end of the ribbon and slaves to the middle and your OS hard drive must be a master on the primary IDE.