PC transplant - patient comatose

ic1male · 25 Dec 2016 at 16:40

Hehe, sorry for the cryptic title. A family member has got a new PC case for Christmas so he went about transferring his motherboard and other components from his old case to the new one.

Unfortunately, this is the first time he's done something like this and screwed the motherboard directly onto the case, without using the little standoffs. The computer powered on, CPU and case fans spin, HDD spins up but there is no POST action at all. No beeps, nothing on the display at all.

After I told him about the standoffs, he took the mobo out, put the standoffs in and put the motherboard back in but same result. It's an MSI 970A-G46 mobo with an AMD FX something or other Bulldozer or Piledriver CPU. He removed the CMOS battery to clear the BIOS also. Any ideas what to check or has he buggered it?

RJC · 25 Dec 2016 at 17:05

I think he may of flubberd it

HoneyBadger · 25 Dec 2016 at 18:22

Remove everything apart from what you need. Try and build it outside the case, if it still fails then the motherboard has gone down the Kermit

darael · 26 Dec 2016 at 10:07

It's quite likely they've put all the standoffs in the case and there could be too many for the motherboard, therefore perhaps one is causing a short.

ic1male · 26 Dec 2016 at 10:40

darael said:
It's quite likely they've put all the standoffs in the case and there could be too many for the motherboard, therefore perhaps one is causing a short.

He only put the six in for the motherboard. I checked that. I wonder if he's fried the GPU which is why there's no display. I've tried the card in another computer (see https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18762613 ) and it doesn't work in that either.

The MSI 970a-G46 doesn't have onboard graphics as an alternative.

demonix · 26 Dec 2016 at 16:01

I don't think you'll need a GPU to test if the board is buggered since if there is a speaker on the board, it'll tell you that it failed the video test because there isn't a card.

If you can get it to spit out an error code then the board is okay, but in all likelihood putting it in the case without any standoffs linked together things that shouldn't have been linked together and fried most of the board along with the graphics card (since even if it has external power, it will still likely be getting some of its power through the PCIe slot).