• A Great friend to the HardForum with a great kid that he is trying to get a scholorship to continue his schooling. Please give hime a vote! Only 24 hours left! Thanks.
    If you have an VOTE FOR KEENAN!

No boot with Gigabyte DS3

K

Klade

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 21, 2004
Messages
158
Hello

I just got all my parts in, asembled them, plugged the thing in and found... nothing.. not even a boot screen.

Here are the specs:
MSI 965 Neo F Motherboard
Intel core 2 duo E6400
G.Skill 2 Gig 800 MHZ (on 1 gig chips)
Coolermaster 600w PSU
ATI x1900xt 512mb
a couple of optical drives and a floppy
Antec p160 case

All the fans spin up as does the floppy drive and I believe the HDs as well. However nothing is ever displayed and I don't hear any beeps. I also can not see any lights on the motherboard, not sure if motherboards still come with little LCD lights letting you know they are getting power.

I've tried unplugging everything but the video card and still no boot.

So now my current theory is either bad motherboard or something is wrong with the chip. It is possible that I did not install the heatsink properly since this is my first core 2 setup and never had to actually fit the heatsink on before. I'm just using the intel stock heatsink and I followed the directions pushing down the four connectors till they clicked but is it possible the thermal paste never came in contact with the cpu? How can I pull the heatsink off to check?

Right now I would like to know if a) there is supposed to be a little lcd light on the motherboard letting me know it is recieving power, and if not how to pull the heatsink off. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
 
I know this might sound stupid, but something I would probably do.

Do you have your operating system disk in your CD drive when you boot up? That would explain why you are getting everything to power up and stay powered up but no boot disk. Your hard drives are blank! lol.


If so....it's probably not your thermal paste that's preventing you from booting. On my first build, in all my excitement, forgot to remove the plastic film that came on my heatsink/fan for my CPU. The computer still started to boot, but then quickly shut-off when the processor got too hot (which only took a couple seconds). Fans, HDD's, everything shut off.

I would be more concerned with the LED's on your motherboard not lighting up. As far as I know, there should be at least one lit as soon as you plug it into your PSU, before you even hit the power button on the front of the tower.

Not an expert though.
 
There is no disk in the dvd drive. When I turn on the power I get nothing at all showing up on screen, it is totally blank.

I never took off a plastic film on my chip there was a black plastic piece of the back.. is there supposed to be a plastic film on it?

Edit: I got the heatsink off, that turned out to be pretty easy. The paste had full contact with the chip and there was no plastic film on the chip either.

I'm down to three possibilities, one is a bad motherboard.
 
It seems quite a few people with my motherboard have this same problem. I think I will return it to newegg for a refund and get a different board.
 
It's probably the board.

Are you 100% certain that everything is plugged into your mobo? I would take everything out of the case and assemble it on the box the mobo came in and see if it will boot from there. It might be a grounding issue.
 
Sadly I am pretty sure everything is plugged into the board. I'll try taking everything out later on tonight but I'm pretty sure at this point its the board. The frequency of people having this same problem with this board is pretty convincing to me.
 
You should always assemble and test everything before putting it in your case. It will help eliminate initial problems.

Assemble the bare minumum on the box the board came in and go from there.
 
Is the screen responding at all? Does the screen say somethihng like "the screen works fine, please check all connections"? If not then you have a bad monitor, if you think the monitor is fine double check its connected well to the graphic card
 
do the barebones setup and reseat the cpu. not all mobos have a power LED on them. check your mobo manual. what voltage are those ram modules? if they're higher than 1.8v, that may be your problem. try it with only one stick, and see if it boots. if so, go into bios and change it to 2.1v or whatever voltage your sticks need to run at their spd specs. if not, you need a lower volatage stick to boot the system with and change the voltage, or you need a bios update.
 
Well I tried it outside the case and just lying on the little foam matt in the box the board came in and still no results. I tried it with one chip of RAM and with no RAM. I know my monitor works since I have a working computer I hook it up to on a regular basis. At this point I'm thinking its pretty conclusive on either the Motherboard or the video card.

And since I have no other way to test the video card (it is my first pci-e) and the motherboard apparently has a bad rap, I'm going with the mobo. Plus the video card has a couple of LEDs the blink when it first gets power so I know at least that much works with it.

I actually already sent for the RMA. I'm asking for a refund and trading up to Gigabyte DS3.
 
Yes, I took the heatsink off and picked up the cpu before putting it back in again. Nothing changed.
 
Hello

This is an update from my other post found here.

So my new DS3 motherboard arrived in the mail today. I installed it with no problems but when I go to turn on the machine I still get nothing showing up on the screen. No boot screen no anything.

Since this is the exact same problem I had with my old motherboard I think that it can not be a motherboard problem. Instead my likely target is the video card.

Is it possible to just get to the boot screen without a CPU? I took the cpu out and tried starting it up without it just to see if I could get to the bios or some such and still had nothing show up on the screen.

Ok next clue, when I turn on one of my monitors and there is no input, a settings window appears, as soon as I turn on my computer that settings window disappears as if it is recieving input, except that nothing shows up to take its place.

The video card I'm using is a Asus x1900xt 512mb card. It has two DVI ports on the back but none of my monitors use DVI so I just use a converter to switch it back to VGA. I know for a fact that my converter works and that my monitors work since I use them everyday. Is it possible that the card just can not display anything once converted to VGA?

Any help here would be very greatly appreciated.
 
No, a computer cannot run without the CPU, lol. What RAM do you have again (model #)? Your ram might require too high of a voltage to boot. If so, you'll need to do what I suggested in my post in your other thread.
 
I'm not talking about running the computer except to get to a bios screen. Heck I'd be happy with some letters on a screen saying "CPU not found." And I was pretty sure a motherboard could get there on its own.

I pulled one of my ram sticks again to see if that would make it work but nothing changed. I've also tried running without any ram and I got the same thing.
 
Ok, I now know it is NOT my video card. I found an old PCI video card in one of the computers I have lying around. I checked to make sure it works in one of my newer systems, then plugged that in. The result was exactly the same, still nothing showing up on the screen.

I also tried swapping out the power supply, but that has no effect.

So now I'm down to this being yet another dead motherboard or possibly a dead CPU. I have no way of knowing which unless someone can either tell me a test or let me know if pulling the CPU and starting the computer will allow me to at least see a boot screen or some kind of onscreen message. Please if anyone knows for a fact and not mere supposition whether this is or is not the case please let me know.
 
The DS3 (and many other P965) defaults to a 1.8v ram voltage. Those G.Skills need 2.1 (i believe) to work. Get you a cheap 128MB stick spec'd at 1.8v, Remove the G.Skill ram and insert the cheap 1.8v stick. power up, go into BIOS and set the memroy voltage to 2.1v (or whatever G.Skills are spec'd at). Save. Power down. Remove the cheap stick and put your G.Skills back in. You should boot just fine.



And no, without a CPU a system can't bootstrap itself.
 
It actually needs 1.9-2 volts. So I guess it can not get to bios without any ram at all either?
 
Nope.

At boot the BIOS's image is mapped to a certain address (0xF000) I think) The CPU is hard wired to point to that address and start executing the instructions it finds there.

Today's BIOS' are usually compressed. So the first instructions the CPU are told to execute are to decompress the BIOS image into RAM and then start executing the decompressed instructions, (which contains POST routines, Video routines, Disk access routines).

So No CPU, No RAM, No boot.
 
Gosh darn it. I miss the old days. Oh well thanks for answering all my questions heh. Theres a staples near my house and they sell DDR2 256mb chips. So tomorrow I'll pop on by and pick one up. With luck they will let me return it after I'm done.
 
I'd actually keep just in case your BUIS has to be reset. (Unless a BIOS update fixes this problem.)
 
enginurd said:
do the barebones setup and reseat the cpu. not all mobos have a power LED on them. check your mobo manual. what voltage are those ram modules? if they're higher than 1.8v, that may be your problem. try it with only one stick, and see if it boots. if so, go into bios and change it to 2.1v or whatever voltage your sticks need to run at their spd specs. if not, you need a lower volatage stick to boot the system with and change the voltage, or you need a bios update.
Click to expand...
You never really answered my question about the ram (which I asked twice), so I never bothered to check the voltage for you. Hopefully, this is your problem, and not a dead CPU. Good luck. Oh yah, and if its cheap enough, I'd keep that spare stick. Though, they should have fixed this issue in the latest BIOS. Check on the gigabyte site to be sure.

Regarding the BIOS solution... the problem with that is, you can't update your bios without some RAM, unless they send you the BIOS chip, lol.
 
Ok, I went to the store today and bought a stick of 512 DDR 5400 (it was the cheapest they had). I popped this in and the computer started right up. Yea me.

Sadly thats about as far as I can get it. I went into the BIOS and overcharged the DIMM control by +.1 volt to no effect with my normal G.Skill ram, I went back and tried .2 volt and still no effect. The G.Skill is set at 5-5-5-15 timing so I went in and changed to that timing and still no effect.

I then went to Gigabytes website and downloaded the latest bios, using my 512 stick I succesfully flashed the bios and using the new default settings I still had no effect.

Is there an obvious setting I'm missing? The voltage for ram reads 1.9-2 volts. So it should work with +.1 or +.2 volts from the base of 1.8 volts. Am I doing this math right? The base really is 1.8 correct?
 
hmmm, that's definately a pickle you in there. Can you test the G.Skill stick in another machine? Also are you removing the cheapy 512 before you install the G.Skill? Another thing have you tried booting one stick of the G.Skill at a time testing each slot?
 
Sadly I don't have another computer that takes 240 pin chips. I am removing the 512 before installing the g.skill and I've tried booting with only one stick of g.skill. Does it matter if the settings in the bios are on auto or is it required that I put the timings in manually?
 
Klade said:
Sadly I don't have another computer that takes 240 pin chips. I am removing the 512 before installing the g.skill and I've tried booting with only one stick of g.skill. Does it matter if the settings in the bios are on auto or is it required that I put the timings in manually?
Click to expand...

Try putting the in manually. If spec doesn't work, then go looser. (higher numbers).

Also make sure the RAM frequency is set correctly. For example is you DDR2-667, make sure the DRAM clock is at 333,
 
If SPD and AUTO don't work, then yes, set them manually. If that still doesnt work... I guess you need new ram? which would be bummerz :(
 
Ok, it looks like I finally got this sucker working. It took an odd combination of +.4 volt overcharge and a forced underclock of 667mhz to make the RAM work and remain stable. I'm really not sure why this is since the ram is DDR2-6400. I'm happy that I have a working computer at this point but I sure would like to know why I can't get the full juice out of my ram.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top