Soldato
For a giggle I decided at the weekend to try and bring an old machine back to life. It's an old MSI K9A2 Platinum with an Athlon XP Dual Core Processor.
As the motherboard has been sat gathering dust for (a number of) years, I got my trusty paintbrush and some compressed air for the heatsink and set to work cleaning it up. I also cleaned the heatsink & processor and applied some new thermal paste. So far, so good. I also had an old OCZ PSU (400 or 450 watts - can't remember which at this second) that I dusted off.
After putting it all together in a not-expensive midi tower and adding a HIS HD 5670 GPU I tried booting it (I've also tried a couple of other spare GPUs I had loafing around). Everything sounds like it's coming on but I can't get anything to display on screen. I've tried two different monitors, both of which I use for work, and both an HDMI and VGA cable to rule that out. No difference. All the connected fans spin up (rear case, PSU, heatsink).
I've also tested the PSU with my Thermaltake ATX PSU Tester and all results are that it's working. The one other interesting thing of note is that, after switching the PC on, when I turn it off I can't turn it back on again unless I cut the power to the PSU (until the motherboard light goes out) and thwn switch it back on again. If I switch the PC on and leave it, it all just sits there humming quietly but other than that shows no signs of POSTing.
There are a couple of lights on the motherboard which I've circled in the below picture as it's not very clear with the camera flash. There is a white and green light to the right of the memory slots by the two pots, and there's another green one (which seems to denote power is getting to the board) above the PCIe slots.
I'm currently stumped, so any suggestions welcome to help get it going or work out whether the board is duff.
As the motherboard has been sat gathering dust for (a number of) years, I got my trusty paintbrush and some compressed air for the heatsink and set to work cleaning it up. I also cleaned the heatsink & processor and applied some new thermal paste. So far, so good. I also had an old OCZ PSU (400 or 450 watts - can't remember which at this second) that I dusted off.
After putting it all together in a not-expensive midi tower and adding a HIS HD 5670 GPU I tried booting it (I've also tried a couple of other spare GPUs I had loafing around). Everything sounds like it's coming on but I can't get anything to display on screen. I've tried two different monitors, both of which I use for work, and both an HDMI and VGA cable to rule that out. No difference. All the connected fans spin up (rear case, PSU, heatsink).
I've also tested the PSU with my Thermaltake ATX PSU Tester and all results are that it's working. The one other interesting thing of note is that, after switching the PC on, when I turn it off I can't turn it back on again unless I cut the power to the PSU (until the motherboard light goes out) and thwn switch it back on again. If I switch the PC on and leave it, it all just sits there humming quietly but other than that shows no signs of POSTing.
There are a couple of lights on the motherboard which I've circled in the below picture as it's not very clear with the camera flash. There is a white and green light to the right of the memory slots by the two pots, and there's another green one (which seems to denote power is getting to the board) above the PCIe slots.
I'm currently stumped, so any suggestions welcome to help get it going or work out whether the board is duff.
