Bad motherboard or CPU?

[travbrad]

I went to start up my PC today and the fans spin up but I don't get a single beep like I normally do when starting up my PC, and my monitors don't display anything at all (not even BIOS stuff). The fans all spin up though.

I swapped out video cards and confirmed it's not my video card (my 660 works in another PC, and my 460 from that other PC doesn't work in my main PC). It's also not my monitors since they also work with my other PC

I took off the heatsink and CPU and examined the motherboard socket pins with a magnifying glass and couldn't see any bent ones.

At this point I was thinking it has to be a motherboard issue. However, I then tried removing my memory to see if I could get it to beep the "missing memory" error code, and it DOES beep the corresponding code.

I'm really stumped now, any ideas? Could it be a problem with the PCI-E slot itself on the motherboard? Power supply maybe? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Deleted member 88227]

Does the motherboard/cpu have a built in GPU? If yes, try booting without a GPU.
Do you have a spare PSU? If yes, try it.
Do you have other memory to try? If yes, try it. If not, try one module at a time in different slots.

 

[travbrad]

Thanks for your help!

I had already tried removing each memory module and trying to boot with each one separately. I thought there was no way both sticks of memory could have gone bad at the same time, but apparently that is what happened.

I swapped the memory from my secondary PC (that was working) into my main PC (that wasn't working) and that solved the issue. I also tried the memory from my main PC in my secondary PC and it then also wouldn't display anything on the monitor. So it's definitely bad memory.

I was thinking about upgrading to 16GB of memory soon anyway, so I guess now is the time to do it. The only downside is memory is apparently worth its weight in gold now. Off to Microcenter I go.