New PC - dud motherboard?

[Raven1300]

I've been building a new PC, with the following specs:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
• Gigabyte GA-945P-S3
• Scythe Ninja 1100P
• Kingston 2048mb kit PC5300 (667mhz)
• Sapphire X1950XTX
• Western Digital WD740ADFD Raptor
• Hiper HPU-4K580 Type-R Modular 580W
• Antec P180

including other parts, of course, that are irrelevant to this discussion.

All hooked up, all power cables checked, so I power it on. I hear the POST, whirring of the drives, etc. But no video.

I throw in a new video card just to test it. Still, no video. I put my own graphics card into another working machine. Gets video fine, so that's not the problem. At this stage I was thinking it may be a problem with the PCI express slot itself.

I took off the heatsink and removed the CPU. I noticed that one of the receiving pins in the socket is squashed - I didn't notice this before I put the CPU on initially, but I have to admit I wasn't looking for it at the time.

One thing I never tested was one RAM chip at a time. It seems to me, within my somewhat limited knowledge, that there's something wrong with this motherboard, whether it's the squashed CPU socket pin or not. If anyone could come up with other suggestions I'd appreciate it. At this stage I'll be returning the motherboard tomorrow.

 

[DefineByte]

Have you ruled out the monitor and/or the DVI/VGA cable?

It has been known for certain video cards with certain motherboards to show no video during POST but then work fine past that stage (e.g. in Windows). I'm assuming you've got further than that.

If the bent pin was causing a problem I'd expect some kind of error code (no experiance of this, so could be wrong). The pin is probably just for power (wouldn't be of much concern) but you'd have to look at a pinout diagram to confirm that. Might as well send it back though. You never know, it may have shipped that way. x)

 

[Raven1300]

Have you ruled out the monitor and/or the DVI/VGA cable?

I have ruled them out, they're the ones I'm using currently, and worked fine with my friend's working machine.

It has been known for certain video cards with certain motherboards to show no video during POST but then work fine past that stage (e.g. in Windows). I'm assuming you've got further than that.

Good point, but the fact is I took my video card out and put it into my friend's working machine (which has the exact same motherboard) and it worked fine. Unfortunately the stage I'm at is the furtherest I've ever been, I've never been able to get any kind of video from the system at all.

If the bent pin was causing a problem I'd expect some kind of error code (no experiance of this, so could be wrong). The pin is probably just for power (wouldn't be of much concern) but you'd have to look at a pinout diagram to confirm that. Might as well send it back though. You never know, it may have shipped that way. x)

I have no experience with bent CPU socket pins either, I had a thought that it might detect it as the CPU not being seated properly and therefore refuse to start at all? Not sure.

 

[DefineByte]

Does the video card's fan spin up?

Have you tried clearing the CMOS?

You could try booting from a Linux live CD and see if anything appears.

 

[Clockworks]

The video card is most likely fine. As mentioned, boot it with a live linux CD to see if anything works.