For The Love Of God I Need Help

[AngryN3rd]

dear tweaktown forums,

for 2 years you've always been there for me, now is when i need you the most.

I just purchased and put together

P4 2.8 Ghz 478p with hyperthreading
AOPEN AX4SPE-N mobo with 800mhz bus
one stick of 256 PC3200 (400mhz) DDR
ABIT GeForce 4 TI4200 64mb (8x)
NEC DVDRW drive
120 GB Western Digital hdd
17 inch LCD

Yeah so that sounds pretty sweet right? well unfortunately for me i have run into some problems. To the extent of my knowledge everything is installed correctly. When i went to power on after putting all this together the only thing that happened were the fans started spinning. So then i started playing around and when i unplugged the IDE devices, the fans spun up and then initiated and started spinning up faster. But when they spun faster, it still did not output to the monitor and needless to say i have been pretty pissed off. Is it possible i have damaged hardware, or is it human error that is keeping me from my glory? Please help.

[Neil2094]

Hi

you might have to wait until the big players get here but if it where I would be to do this.


1) If you have an onboard graphics card try using that, possibly the card might be damaged.

2) Make sure the connections to the mother board are correct and eveything.

3) Check to make sure the processor is installed and locked down properly.

4) On my AMD system the motherboard was faulty and I was getting much the same problem. Perhaps you can try and get another motherboard from somewhere to test it on?

5) Perhaps the power supply isn't giving enough juice to kick the PC into life.

6) Are you getting any system beeps at all. Perhaps the Memory isn't seated correctly.

I think that covers the main things. Hope you get it sorted

[minibubba]

it's certainly a hardware problem, unless something is not plugged in right. but there is a large number of things that can cause this. first, i would remove all non-nessesary devices so that when it is all removed all you have is this:

motherboard
cpu (with HSF)
ram
video card
power supply

and a monitor and keyboard

once it is stipped down to that, make sure it is all plugged in properly

now boot the machine and see if you can get to the bios...if you can then add each peice of hardware back, one at a time, tro see where the culprit lies

more than likely it is one of your core hardware components. so in this case you will need to replace each piece of hardware indivdually. This will also include testing the PSU with a mutimeter, or replaceing it with a known good one.

use any spare parts you have, incuding parts from currently working computers if nessesary. If you have used all the parts you have at your disposal and stil have not narrowed it down to a specific piece of hardware then I would recomend taking it into your local PC repair shop.

btw, do you get any beeps or error codes at all from the BIOS?

if I had to guess, I'd say it is either your mobo, PSU, or CPU...in that order, but it could be something else