UPDATED:FINALLY FIXED, Faulty HSF wire and temp sensor

[Anonemous]

guess I gotta stick with the new chip since that 15% restocking fee really BITES

 

[mechBgon]

No hard drive. Absolute essentials for a POST. Cardboard. 🙂

 

[Anonemous]

gave up and put up more cash for a biostar board (newegg don't carry those shuttle boards anymore 🙁)

 

[Anonemous]

hehe posted at the same time! 😀 yea, will try new board if it doesn't work I'm getting a dell or a p4 or something

 

[Anonemous]

k, new board arrived BUT I gave my old mobo one last go and it WORKED (turns out the VGA output of vid card didn't function so I guess it wouldn't post?).... somewhat before another problem reared it's ugly head...


after two sucessful posts with the OLD mobo+new cpu, I decided to put together the rest of the components => ensuing bad luck


so what else could go wrong...


well when I put together the rest of the components, of course it did not post, but the AUDIO post was functional so I could hear the new problem loud and clear...

it blared, System Memory Failed, k so moved the ram (pc3200) to different slot configurations and made sure it was secured into each slot but I would always get the same message. (also repeated with only one ram stick at a time in different slots, no dice)

So I pulled a pc2700 ram from this celeron I'm using and it works.

Now the kicker I'm typing right now on the celeron that's using the two 'Failed' sticks of ram. What could cause this? I wouldn't think a mobile barton is picky on ram and I don't think the pc3200 memory is bad since I 'm using them right now. Any ideas?

 

[Anonemous]

so close... would Vdimm on the ram cause this problem?

 

[MrCodeDude]

The two most common sources of problems/instabilities. Memory and the Power-Supply.

Check the rails on the PSU with a multi-meter using the green -> ground paperclip trick.

Boot up the machine with only the CPU, Mobo, PSU, Memory. What kind of beeps do you get? (if any?)

If you don't get a beep or any startup, swap out components in this order: Memory, PSU, Mobo, CPU

If you do get a beep, see what the beep translates to.

Usually your CPU isn't the picky one, it's the mobo.

 

[batmanuel]

What revision of the BIOS does the new board Asus sent have? On my A7N8X Deluxe rev. 1.04, I had all sort of weird intermittent RAM issues with some of the early BIOSes (sometimes the system was rock solid Prime 95 stable, other times it wouldn't boot and I'd get a RAM failure error). Things didn't finally stabilize until around BIOS version 1007 for me. In my experience with this board there were some BIOS versions that were picky as heck when it came to RAM.

 

[Arcanedeath]

Aye the orginal A7N8X deluxe (ie non E version) rev 1.04 and rev 2.0 were really picky about ram untill you got the final bios 1007, if you can get it to post try flashing the bios to 1007 and see if that helps.

 

[Anonemous]

k thx for your advice,

actual problem => faulty hsf fan wire and also faulty temp sensor. Had to replace those, faulty temp sensor was not giving correct temp so the fan was really slow and the CPU would cook at 60C if left on idle for 5 minutes. Everything is A-OK now. The ram didn't work because the motherboard automatically set the ram to boot at 4-1-1 speeds which is really insane. I didn't know this until I resetted the CMOS after installing the RAM to reset the settings.

Returning and barton and new nf2 mobo back to newegg. Will eat about 30$ in returning and restocking fees but I'm happy this 3 month ordeal is finally over.


Thx Mechbgon and the rest for the help and advice.