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Forecast calls for a 90% chance of brainstorms tonight...
Here goes, hope something comes to light:
I remember a really simple problem I had with a new board... the contacts in the AGP slot were pretty stiff. There are two layers of contacts in an AGP slot, and I had only gotten the video card down into the first layer, so of course it wasn't working. Took a really surprising amount of force to get it all the way into the second layer :Q
On the same board, I had a little trouble getting the memory modules all the way into the slots. The system spun fans, but wouldn't function, and upon getting a flashlight and looking closely, it turned out that the memory modules were not all the way into the slots. That's another easy thing to check.
The AMD heatsinks have a step cut into one end of the base, which is there to clear the solid plastic end of the CPU socket. If the heatsink's accidentally installed 180° backwards, then the heatsink gets jacked up by the solid area and can't make good contact with the CPU core, resulting in immediate CPU overheat. So check for that. If this were the case, it's entirely possible the CPU is fried as a result... it takes literally 2 seconds for that little scrap of silicon to hit dangerous temperatures without cooling.
If you bought a heatsink that comes disassembled, it's possible to put the heatsink on the right way but reverse the clip, also causing problems (Volcano 7 comes to mind here).
Another possible cause of overheating would be to forget to take the plastic slip off the thermal pad on the heatsink, or to not use any thermal pad or grease at all. If you're sure the pad is there, that you took the slip off, and that the heatsink is on the right way, don't take the heatsink off until you've exhausted all other possibilities. Reason: the thermal pad "melts to fit" the gap between the heatsink and CPU, and is good for
one use only. If you took the heatsink off, this type of thermal pad would have to be scraped off and replaced with high-quality thermal grease such as Arctic Silver 3.
If all that's good but it still won't go, try disconnecting all the drives from both the IDE cables and from the power supply, and power up the motherboard with nothing but video, memory, CPU/heatsink and keyboard. If it won't run like that, take the motherboard out of the case, lay it on a non-conductive surface (cardboard or whatever), get a 16-ounce hammer or bigger... oops, hang on, hammer comes a little later.
Lay the board outside the case and try to fire it up like that, using a screwdriver tip to make momentary connection on the Power Switch pins to start it. If it starts now, then maybe there's an extra motherboard support grounding out on the underside of the board or something. If not, try a different power supply, RAM and video card if possible.
RAM quality could be an issue, is it at least semi-name-brand stuff like Kingston ValueRAM? Power supply could be an issue, some "400W" power supplies from el-cheapo companies have laughable levels of actual wattage on the 3.3V + 5V combined lines, where it counts.
Good luck, hope something works out for you.
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