what is broken?

[btangel]

My brother's computer just stopped booting up. I tried a new working CPU and nothing. We suspect it's either the video card (7800GTX) or the motherboard (MSI K8N Neo4-SLI). It's hard for us to troubleshoot because my computer doesn't have PCI-E. The only thing I could try was the ram and it works.

The lights are all on and everything when we push the button, but nothing shows up on the screen. Does the motherboard let out a bios beep without a working vid card? Cuz if it's suppose to then it's probably the mobo? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[wanderer27]

I had a similiar thing happen a few months back (no video, no beeps). System seemed to be booting, but I couldn't tell for sure.

Anyway, I had it nailed down to either the MB, Video Card, or PSU. I swapped the Motherboard first and that turned out to be the culprit.

I have a different make (ASUS) MB than you, but it could still be the problem - no guarantees though . . . .

 

[Captante]

The motherboard is by far the most complicated component in your PC so its the most likley to suffer a failure, however I'd try a couple things before you run out & replace it.

First try clearing the CMOS & see if that has any effect, next if you have an old PCI video card laying around I'd try throwing that in & see what happens... you might also try swapping out the power supply because even though it has enough power to make the board LED's light up, it might not have enough juice to boot.

Finally you should remove everything from the board except the video card, CPU & 1 DIMM of memory & see if it boots then.... if it does, start adding components back util it fails to boot again & if it doesn't you'll know you tried all you can do at least & its time to start throwing money at the problem... as suggested I'd start by replacing or RMA'ing the motherboard.