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Four-month old system suddenly won't boot... dead board?

B

brettjrob

Senior member
Hello all,

I built a new system this past August using an ABIT IS7-E board and P4 2.4C. It has been running at a moderate overclock -- 2.4C @ 3.0GHz with FSB 250MHz -- but I have sufficient cooling. For the past four months, the system has been running wonderfully with no sign of trouble.

So this morning, I go to turn my monitor back on (I leave the system on overnight to download), and it doesn't receive a signal. I try resetting to no avail, and eventually clear the CMOS and remove/replace the ATX power cord to the mobo, and even then it refuses to deliver a signal to my monitor. At that point I figure it has to be the video card, but it's working absolutely fine in my parents' system as I type this, so that's not the culprit either.

As far as I can tell, the only two possibilities remaining are bad CPU or bad mobo, and I'm definitely leaning towards the latter at this point. When I press the power button, the red power LED on the mobo comes on, all the fans start spinning (including the ones hooked up to the mobo), but there is no sign of any other activity... no beeps, no nothing. In fact, even when I removed the RAM and video card completely, I still didn't get any beeps when trying to boot!

This all screams 'bad motherboard' to me, but it's just hard to believe that the board has worked flawlessly for several months and would suddenly die for no apparent reason... there haven't been any recent power outages or other problems that would have caused this (to my knowledge). Any suggestions on what else I should try before RMA'ing the board would be greatly appreciated... but keep in mind that I hadn't even opened up my case for over a month before this happened today, so I'm 99.9% sure that the problem isn't something like "the cable is loose."

Thanks in advance for any advice!
 
I'm not familiar with the mobo, but it seems to me from your problem description that it might be your RAM or your PSU also. If you have access to a multimeter, check your voltages. For a P4 system there'll be 12V, 5V, 3.3V and 1.75V.

If you have an unused stick of RAM that's compatible, try booting with it.

Hope that helps.

alzan
 
Thanks for the reply.

I'm 99.9% sure the RAM is not the problem... in fact, the board behaves exactly the same even with no RAM inserted at all! The PSU, though, could possibly be the problem. It's certainly still functioning, as all the lights come on and all the fans are spinning, but the voltages could be out of whack. The PSU is an Antec TruePower 380W that I bought about five months ago... I'd heard great things about this brand, so it'd be surprising to me if it has failed. I guess I can try my other PSU, but unfortunately, it's a generic 300W POS 🙁.
 

My last board was an Abit board (different model) and I had a very similar problem. About once a month I would turn it on and get the same thing you described, you'd hear the fans come on but no signal to the monitor and no beeping. My problem was intermitant but I suspected the power supply. I replaced the generic 300 W PSU with an Enermax 430W and the problem went away.

Do you have multiple hard drives and multiple CD ROMs? Try starting the system with only the main hard drive and no CD ROMs or floppy.
This may not be the problem but it might be worth a try.
 
Ha ... we were posting at the same time, I didn't see your post about having the Antec 380W. They make good PSUs. I would still try to rule it out as the problem though.
 
Try taking out/unhooking EVERYTHING but neccessities (just have video card, CPU, RAM and PSU hooked up, everything else unhooked completley, such as optical drives, floppy drives, hard drives, sound cards, TV tuners, everything). If that doesnt work, try swapping PSUs. If you still have nothing, I know this sounds crazy, but unhook your reset switch plug from the mobo. I had this problem once (it turned out the button was sticking). If that doesn't work either, than I would recommend RMA'ing the board.
 
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