PC wont POST.

[imported_Traxis]

My parents Gateway PC died. Basically, when they hit the power switch, the PSU made a whining/squealing noise. I bought a 350w Antec Smartpower 2.0 to replace the bad PSU. After installing it, everything seemed to work fine, except when I was in the BIOS tweaking some stuff it froze. After trying to reboot I got 3 beeps from the motherboard, which meant bad RAM or RAM IC. I tried all the RAM individually and tried a stick I knew worked and still got the error codes. So I bought a new motherboard, an exact replacement of what was already there, (Intel D850EMV2 s478). I hooked everything up and now when turning the PC on the CPU fan, hard drives and disk drives spin up, but thats it. I get no output to the monitor, no beep codes, nothing. What's the most likely culprit?

Here's the basic specs-
Intel D850EMV2 mobo
Pentium 4 2.0 GHz Northwood
4x 128 MB PC800 RDRAM
GeForce Ti4200 128MB

 

[refresh daemon]

Try removing the videocard and startin up the computer--do you get any beeps? What about with everything but the processor?

jc

 

[mechBgon]

Also, confirm that you did get the square 4-pin ATX12V cable plugged in too.

 

[imported_Traxis]

Without the video card I get no beep codes still. And yes, the 12v cable is plugged in. I've tried booting with nothing but the processor, and still nothing happens. So odds are the processor is fried, right?

 

[refresh daemon]

I'm guessing that it's the processor, although you might've purchased a lemon mobo as well. Do you have another chip that you can test the mobo with? What about starting up with just a blank mobo (I've never done this, so I don't know if a mobo is capable of emitting a beep code w/o a processor, but maybe?)?

jc

 

[imported_Traxis]

I got ahold of another chip and it fired up fine. So when the original PSU died, I guess it took out the mobo and processor with it. Is that normal?

 

[refresh daemon]

I think it's totally possible, if your PSU dies and sends crazy unregulated power into the rest of your computer as a last act of vengeance. If you didn't lose anything else attached, consider yourself lucky.

jc