No Post with X800 XL and Chaintech VNF4/Ultra

[KillerPotato]

Hi everyone. My brother just got:

Chaintech VNF4/Ultra
Athlon64 3000+ Venice Core
Radeon X800 XL
Matched pair of 512MB Corsair Value 3200

We swapped out the old motherboard, video card, RAM, and installed the processor/heatsink, and fired it up, only to be met with no POST. His old CRT sat completely idle in powersaving mode.

He has a Thermaltake Silent Purepower 480W ATX 1.3 PSU. He was wary about using a non-ATX2.0 PSU since this motherboard has a 24 pin connector, but he had looked around some forums and found someone that had the same power supply, motherboard, and video card combination working, so he concluded that it would probably be all right.

I stripped the computer down to only motherboard, vid card, ram, CPU, keyboard, and monitor, and placed the motherboard on cardboard to eliminate all other factors, but it is still not giving any POST. I tried the DIMMs independently in the various RAM slots - no combination of DIMMs and RAM slots makes any difference.

I tried hooking up a system speaker from an old case to the motherboard, but it gave no sound - no power on beep or error codes.

My thoughts at the moment are leaning towards a motherboard or video card problem, or that the video card is not getting enough power. I am going to try and get a legacy PCI video card to test whether it is the Radeon that is at fault. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks very much,
Eric

 

[KillerPotato]

He informs me now that the person he had found while researching the use of his PSU with the X800 XL was actually using a different motherboard : - /.

He was worried about the power because the X800 XL doesn't have any molex connectors, and so draws all its power from the motherboard, and so the 20 pin might not have enough.

The motherboard has a 4-pin power connector which we have attached. I am not sure if this is a stopgap they use for compatability with previous versions of ATX PSU's or not.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[aGreenAgent]

I can't vouch for the power supply, I haven't touched a 24-pin PSU yet. But I would take out the ram altogether and see if it gives you memory error beeps. Also, so the same thing with your vid card and processor. If taking out each one of these separately doesn't get any beeps, then I would say motherboard or PSU.

For now, get a 24-pin PSU. If it works, that's that. If it doesn't, take the PSU back and try something else.

 

[KillerPotato]

We got an Antec ATX 2.0 PSU, but it didn't make any difference. He's RMAing the motherboard, since it isn't producing power-on beeps or error codes with any of 3 different system speakers, and there is still no POST. I am almost tempted to tell him to RMA the video card as well, but we aren't sure that it was faulty. Sadly, we couldn't find anyone who had an old PCI card.

This actually reminds me of my first ASUS board - no POST, no beeps. A new board fixed everything :-\.

Thanks for the help.

 

[dklingen]

KillerPotato,

I was looking at VNF4 stuff and saw your question. Do you figure out what the cause of the problem was (I am just curious)?

dklingen