I am having problems in the early stages of a new build and want to make sure I am not overlooking anything. No overclocking or gaming intended?I just want a fast, quiet, and stable machine for work purposes.
Components assembled so far:
Compucase LX-6A19 case (very similar to Antec 3700)
Asus P5B motherboard, retail
Intel E6600 processor, retail
Corsair Value Select DDR2 667 ram (2 gigs total, a matched pair of 1 gig sticks)
Seasonic S12 330 watt power supply
Scythe Mine cooler
Arctic Silver 5
Yate Loon 120 mm fans, front and rear
Sapphire X550 PCI Express video card, retail
Old Sony CD drive just to have something to load Memtest from CD.
I assembled the bare minimum needed to get into the bios?motherboard, power supply, CPU, cooler, video card, and both memory sticks. No HD, no OS, etc.
Booted successfully on the first attempt. Looked through the bios and see nice low temperatures, nominal voltage values and think everything is cool. I then ran Memtest86, which generated 23 errors in 5 passes, all in test 7. Pulled one stick out. Booted with remaining stick and passed test 7 at least 20 times without error. Pulled the good stick and replaced it with the bad stick. Would not boot, giving the classic 3 beeps repeatedly. Tried the bad stick in other memory slots and still could not boot with it alone.
Switched back to the good stick, intending to finish the build and to later RMA both sticks to Newegg.
Out of the blue, I get no video signal to my CRT monitor, as if the monitor cable were not connected to the video card at all. I shut down and connected the same monitor and cable to my old PC and it worked perfectly. I reseated the video card, which had no effect. Repeated attempts, reboots, and reconnecting the monitor cable have no effect. The monitor is clearly not defective as it works on the old PC.
All bios settings are stock default. No hard drive, no operating system, no software other than Memtest from the CD drive.
When both memory sticks were originally installed, I booted fine and both sticks were acknowledged as 2048 megs total memory, even though 1 stick was presumably dead or dying because the memtest errors came about an hour or two later. Would you expect the bios to acknowledge a bad memory stick when memory is counted?
I assume I have 1 bad memory stick and either the sudden death of a video card or the sudden death of a P5B PCI Express video card slot.
I have no other standby equipment that I can use to swap in and out to help decide if the disappearing video is a video card or motherboard problem. All I know for sure is that the monitor works perfectly well when connected to a second PC, which has a Matrox AGP card.
My current plan is to RMA both memory sticks and the video card, but realize the problem may be motherboard related.
What am I overlooking? I have built only a few machines and never encountered anything remotely like this. The video card has no more than 5 hours on it, mostly while running memtest. More likely a video card issue or a bad slot? Memory and video issues completely unrelated and just bad luck? I just need some fresh analysis in case I am leaving something out.
Components assembled so far:
Compucase LX-6A19 case (very similar to Antec 3700)
Asus P5B motherboard, retail
Intel E6600 processor, retail
Corsair Value Select DDR2 667 ram (2 gigs total, a matched pair of 1 gig sticks)
Seasonic S12 330 watt power supply
Scythe Mine cooler
Arctic Silver 5
Yate Loon 120 mm fans, front and rear
Sapphire X550 PCI Express video card, retail
Old Sony CD drive just to have something to load Memtest from CD.
I assembled the bare minimum needed to get into the bios?motherboard, power supply, CPU, cooler, video card, and both memory sticks. No HD, no OS, etc.
Booted successfully on the first attempt. Looked through the bios and see nice low temperatures, nominal voltage values and think everything is cool. I then ran Memtest86, which generated 23 errors in 5 passes, all in test 7. Pulled one stick out. Booted with remaining stick and passed test 7 at least 20 times without error. Pulled the good stick and replaced it with the bad stick. Would not boot, giving the classic 3 beeps repeatedly. Tried the bad stick in other memory slots and still could not boot with it alone.
Switched back to the good stick, intending to finish the build and to later RMA both sticks to Newegg.
Out of the blue, I get no video signal to my CRT monitor, as if the monitor cable were not connected to the video card at all. I shut down and connected the same monitor and cable to my old PC and it worked perfectly. I reseated the video card, which had no effect. Repeated attempts, reboots, and reconnecting the monitor cable have no effect. The monitor is clearly not defective as it works on the old PC.
All bios settings are stock default. No hard drive, no operating system, no software other than Memtest from the CD drive.
When both memory sticks were originally installed, I booted fine and both sticks were acknowledged as 2048 megs total memory, even though 1 stick was presumably dead or dying because the memtest errors came about an hour or two later. Would you expect the bios to acknowledge a bad memory stick when memory is counted?
I assume I have 1 bad memory stick and either the sudden death of a video card or the sudden death of a P5B PCI Express video card slot.
I have no other standby equipment that I can use to swap in and out to help decide if the disappearing video is a video card or motherboard problem. All I know for sure is that the monitor works perfectly well when connected to a second PC, which has a Matrox AGP card.
My current plan is to RMA both memory sticks and the video card, but realize the problem may be motherboard related.
What am I overlooking? I have built only a few machines and never encountered anything remotely like this. The video card has no more than 5 hours on it, mostly while running memtest. More likely a video card issue or a bad slot? Memory and video issues completely unrelated and just bad luck? I just need some fresh analysis in case I am leaving something out.
Facebook
Twitter