Another dead motherboard?

Gundog48 · 17 Apr 2013 at 21:31

I've been building PCs for a while and have always assumed I know what I'm doing. I've been building a PC as a gift for a friend of mine. I was originally using an old Gigabyte motherboard I had kicking around. When I came to build the system it wouldn't POST and gave no error beeps even with the RAM completely removed. Breadboarded it and decided it was the motherboard, I bought a replacement Asus board which came today.

Breadboarded the system first with CPU mobo and RAM, got a POST beep, excellent! Put it all in the case, installed the graphics card, connected all the power and started it up. Everything span up and made the expected noises, but no POST beep, and no video output with or without the graphics card. Removed the RAM completely, still no beeps.

I'm going to breadboard tomorrow, but I'm anticipating another dead motherboard. I've never damaged a system during installation and I'd like to think I'm more competent than to break 2 in a row. What's gong on here? Could the graphics card somehow be causing an issue? I don't know, I'm just rather annoyed and frustrated, especially considering how much of a pain the cable management in this case is which I must now undo.

Plan is to breadboard it and try another PSU, but I don't hold out much hope. Any ideas what's going wrong?

Halestorm · 18 Apr 2013 at 10:02

Is there a rouge stand-off or metal burr on the mobo tray that could be shorting something underneath?
I've had issues caused by "haunted cases" where whatever i put into a certain case would not work, but the same gear worked perfectly in another case

danny77 · 18 Apr 2013 at 10:24

Had the same issue the other day putting a pc together with some old bits I had lying around. Fans would spin up, no beeps at all even with no ram, I tried without the heatsink on the cpu and it posted straight away.
Turns out for some reason the stock amd cooler was putting too much pressure on the cpu, I would build it up complete outside of the case to rule out any shorts that may be happening within the case first, then take it from there

mjallan123 · 18 Apr 2013 at 11:24

A rouge standoff sounds very likely. Otherwise, you might just be very unlucky.

DaleTheWhale · 18 Apr 2013 at 11:43

mjallan123 said:
A rouge standoff sounds very likely. Otherwise, you might just be very unlucky.

This, I had a problem like this with my first build. Turned out I left a standoff screwed in and it was touching the board.

snips86x · 18 Apr 2013 at 11:44

ThaReaperGuy said:
This, I had a problem like this with my first build. Turned out I left a standoff screwed in and it was touching the board.

I think we've all fallen into this trap at least once!

DaleTheWhale · 18 Apr 2013 at 13:49

snips86x said:
I think we've all fallen into this trap at least once!

Kept me baffled for well over a day, was annoying when I sorted it out and realised that was the problem!

V F · 18 Apr 2013 at 14:17

ThaReaperGuy said:
This, I had a problem like this with my first build. Turned out I left a standoff screwed in and it was touching the board.

snips86x said:
I think we've all fallen into this trap at least once!

How on earth else does it work? the board rests on the standoffs, they don't float... case/brass/pcb/screw. Ah, so you had 10 in? usually with an extra and all the metal spiky parts on the back you'd hear a crunching sound, no?

Gundog48 · 18 Apr 2013 at 17:02

I tried breadboarding again as I did before I built it, just the CPU, motherboard and RAM, even took the CPU cooler off to check that wasn't the issue. Still nothing, even if I remove the RAM. I would normally conclude that the CPU was dead, but it posted the first time before I built the system, I'm pretty lost!