Help me troubleshoot a mobo.

Geckovich

Geckovich

Geckovich

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OK, so the other day I managed to pick up an untested MSI P7N Diamond for a bit of a gamble, I had no way to test it before buying but for the money, thought it was worth the risk.

Fast forward to today, I was going to use the mobo in a build for a friend, put everything together, fire it up and....no signal.

What I know:

There is no obvious damage to the board.
It powers on.
No error beeps.
All diagnostic LEDs (this board has them for EVERY slot) are showing everything is OK.
Tried 3 PSUs, 2 GPUs, 2 CPUs, 2 sets of RAM in various combinations - still nothing.
Can't see any missing jumpers.
Cleared CMOS with both the button and by removing the battery.
I'm running the bare minimum, one stick of ram, CPU and an low power drawing GPU, still no signal.
The mobo is sat on a box right now so it's not shorting.

So here'd the dilema folks, I've tried everything I can think of to get this working but I'm not having much luck. No matter what I do I just get "no signal" from the monitor.

Any ideas?
 
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I've just thought, could it be that it isn't compatible with quads and 45nm (both the CPUs I have at hand to test it with) ? I've heard that this has been a problem with some nvidia chips in the past.

Does anyone think there's any value to this idea? Lots of other reports of this type of boot issue on the MSI website, the common factor seems to be a q6600 or similar.
 
First thing I always check with those symptoms is the 4/8 pin Intel power connector - is that plugged in?

And then I'd be looking at the BIOS reset jumper. If that is in the Clear CMOS position then it won't boot and some NVidia motherboards have 3-pin CMOS clear connectors and they need one or other combination 'made'. So if that jumper is missing that could be your problem.
 
WJA96 said:
First thing I always check with those symptoms is the 4/8 pin Intel power connector - is that plugged in?

And then I'd be looking at the BIOS reset jumper. If that is in the Clear CMOS position then it won't boot and some NVidia motherboards have 3-pin CMOS clear connectors and they need one or other combination 'made'. So if that jumper is missing that could be your problem.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the imput but I'm afraid I've already checked all this. There's only one jumper on the board and I've tried it in both positions. 8 and 24 power are plugged in too.

I'm really stumped, there doesn't seem to be any reason for it to not work, it just wont.

About 15 threads on the MSI forums with similar issues too, unfortunately there's no solution in any of them.
 
WJA96 said:
Just downloaded the manual and from the looks of it the BIOS switch on the back is all there is, which seems odd as there is usually a jumper as well.

It does look like it's FUBAR. On the upside, it should still be under warranty so MSI should take it back for a repair.

http://support.msicomputer.co.uk/index.php?_m=tickets&_a=submit&step=1&departmentid=15

Good luck.
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Yeah, the manual is actually pretty sparse, the paper copy has even less than the download.

Sadly I don't think MSI will except a warranty replacement on a sold as seen pawn shop mobo.

The only think I can think of now is to try to boot using an old socket 775 CPU and see if that will work - hoping of course that this board is one of the few with a crippled bios.
 
Geckovich said:
Yeah, the manual is actually pretty sparse, the paper copy has even less than the download.

Sadly I don't think MSI will except a warranty replacement on a sold as seen pawn shop mobo.

The only think I can think of now is to try to boot using an old socket 775 CPU and see if that will work - hoping of course that this board is one of the few with a crippled bios.
Click to expand...

Well, if you don't fancy RMAing it, I'll take it off your hands at cost and take a punt at it.
 
ati card ? ...can you hook up the pc to a tv via a hdmi cable ....when setting up my 4870 .with ccc i usually get the "no signal" on the screen .... couple of presses on the tv remote and up pops my desktop with ccc settings.
fiddling around with ccc soon has my monitor back to main display and my tv as cloned and scaled.

hope it helps
 
Cheers for the tips guys.

pctestcard - There's no damage to the board.

Dragy2k - I've tried both nvidia and ati cards, no luck with either.

I think it's definately an RMA job, unless of course my one last ditch idea actually works.

I'm borrowing an old socket 775 dual core to see if I've maybe got one of the few boards without BIOS support for quads and 45nm chips.
 
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