Is it a dead motherboard?edit - SUCESS

[Valhalla1]

this is not my week.. first I kill my primary pc when I switched out the stock HSF's for some AX-7's, now the new pc I am building for my uncle wont boot

I finally got time tonight to put it all together but I cant get it to power up...


Asus A7V 266-E
AMD XP 2200+
I quadruple checked the atx power connector to the motherboard, and I removed and reinstalled the atx switch connector as well.. when I plug in the power supply and switch it on, a green led on the motherboard turns on, so it is getting power. but when I hit the switch, the system does not power up. the system fans twitch a little then dont move, and nothing happens

I tried swapping out the (new) power supply with another one and it does the same thing (I know the other power supply is good)

possibilities -
1) dead motherboard. I am worried on this because I installed this into a Lian-Li PC60 aluminum case that has front usb connectors. I wasnt positive on the multitude of little one-pin cables that came with it but I plugged them in and I'm worried this might have fried the board or something if I had them wrong.. they were labeled as follows-
1- Data+ : I plugged this into the usb header pin labeled USBP3+
2- Data- : went into USBP3-
3- GND : went into USB3 Ground
4- VCC : this was the one I wasnt certain on, the only pin left was labeled USB3 Power so I plugged it in there (what is VCC?)

so were these right? after the first attempt at powering on failed I removed them and it still didnt fix the problem but if it fried the board right off..

2) ATX Power switch connector is wrong. I plugged it in to the correct pins, the manual said the white cable goes into the ground and that is the pin I have it in(I've built dozens of pcs and never managed to screw this part up) Also I dont know if this could be it because like i said, when i hit the switch *something* happens (the fan twitches like a centimeter and stops) so it must be at least trying to power the motherboard


3) motherboard doesnt support this cpu.. I also was not sure about this. the A7V-266E has jumpers to set the cpu to either Palomino or early non-palomino Athlon. I set it to Palomino, but the cpu is an XP 2200+ which is a Thoroughbred not Palomino, so maybe the board needs a slower 2100 palomino and it wont work with this 2200?


I'm stumped, any suggestions before I attempt to RMA this motherboard?

 

[spanky]

i was just about to suggest flashing the bios, but u can't boot. DOH! any chance u have another cpu to try and stick in there?

 

[tcsenter]

The A7V266-E supports up to the Athlon XP2200+ with BIOS 1010 or higher (1011 is the latest).

 

[Valhalla1]

I have no idea what the bios is because it wont even power up...

so would not having the latest bios, and thus having a non supported cpu cause the board to not power up ? or should it at least power up to bios screen and then fail or something ?

 

[eclectro]

If you didn't see/smell smoke then you might be ok. VCC refers to the 5 volt powersupply. If you hooked up the USB wrong that would have killed your USB on that board (which could make the board uselss, but you still should be able to post). Hopefully you did not run your motherboard without a CPU heatsink, because if you did you fried the CPU. There are a myriad of other things that could be wrong.

First thing I would do is unplug and replug the RAM. If that doesn't help remove all the cards except the video card, and switch that out with a PCI video card if you can. Then see if you can post. Thats why I like to keep a couple of old known working PCI/ISA video cards around.

The thoroughbred core is rated at 1.5v, while Palomino is rated at 1.75v. Other people have been running this CPU up to 1.85v while overclocking, so it should work. I have not had any experience personally using AMD cpus so take this with a grain of salt.

From reading the reviews on this board it is prone to lockups because of poor heatsink contact on the northbridge see here . But your fans should be starting up inspite of this so I don't think thats it.

If you exerted too much force when attaching the CPU heatsink or installing cards you could have cracked one of the surface mount parts on the board, in which case this means it's a dead board. I worked as a surfacemount tech in an circuit board manufacturing facility, and this is easier to do than it seems. You could also have cracked the CPU core when installing the heatsink.

I hope that this helps you out a little.

 

[KF]

Some mobos have protection for the CPU in case the fan fails. If the CPU fan is not plugged into the right header, the mobo may immediately shut down.

Some people have found that they have shorted the mobo by putting an extra mounting standoff behind the mobo. Some people have found that the screws holding a mobo in place can short to something around the holes, and shifting the mobo a bit fixes this.

I don't think plugging in the USB header wrong would kill anything if no USB device was plugged into it. Those wires are all the way to the end just extensions of the pins. I'd guess you plugged them in right though. VCC is techy for power in this case. (It stands for Voltage, Common Collector, not that that explains much. It meant the voltage that was used to "power" early transistor circuits.)

Resetting the CMOS by the jumper is easy to try.

ASUS may have a jumper to have the FSB start at 100 instead of 133. If so, you can try that and see if the CPU will start at slower speed.

You can unplug and replug everything into the mobo, including the CPU, to make sure it isn't a contact problem.

 

[NesuD]

Asus usually has the bios version printed on a label in the rom chip. Just look at the rom on the board and see what it says. bet it needs a bios flash.

 

[Valhalla1]

Originally posted by: NesuD
Asus usually has the bios version printed on a label in the rom chip. Just look at the rom on the board and see what it says. bet it needs a bios flash.

but i cant flash the bios with no power, right? unless I had some eeprom device to plug the flash chip into..


i will try taking everything out and putting it all back in.. this sux

 

[Valhalla1]

success! i think it was a problem with either the board being shorted out (I changed the metal standoff clips from being pushed in from the backside of the motherboard tray to the front side) or from the agp card not being seating, i could see a tiny bit of gold connector sticking out of the slot but when i redid the standoffs it fit snugly

anyway its booting great now and I'm in the process of installing the os.. thanks for the suggestions

 

[CraigRT]

the system does not power up. the system fans twitch a little then dont move, and nothing happens

I read down to there and realized I had the exact same problem once.

the front USB panel was plugged in wrong to the motherboard... solution = unplug the USB and flip the connector around.

system booted up.