New Previously Used Motherboard Not Working?

Oct 18, 2018
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Bought a new (for me) motherboard from someone on Reddit who claims they tested it and it was working before they sent it. I want to be sure I try everything possible before I ask for a refund.

I have my old motherboard set up net to it on my desk, breadboarding them to see if it is something else in the system. Everything else in the case works. I have it down it just an HDMI cord, 8-pin CPU power cable, SATA cable from the HDD, case power button, motherboard power cable, a single RAM stick, and the CPU fan. The PSU is not plugged in to anything other than that. It starts up, everything lights up on the board and in the case, but there is no display and after about 30 seconds the whole system restarts on its own.

I got visuals to show up once during trials as it was all in the case, I shut it all down and plugged in my GPU, and since then there has been no success. I took it out, took it all the way down t this bare bones setup, nothing. I plugged everything in exactly the same on my old motherboard and it starts right up, visuals and all.

I followed the thread here about motherboard installation, and none of that worked. I took it apart and put it back together several times, nothing. I tried taking out the CMOS battery and swapping the little connector next to it to reset the CMOS or BIOS or whatever, waited a few minutes and put it back the right way, nothing. I hear a short buzz as the system is starting up, but that very well may be just the hard drive spinning up since I have no case speaker that I know of and no speaker attached to the motherboard connector.

I have no idea what else to try.
 
Oct 18, 2018
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The system does work with the old motherboard. It is a i5-4590, WD 500GB HDD, Thermaltake 500W PSU, XFX R9 380 (not plugged in), 2x8 Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600MHz, Formerly Gigabyte Z97M-DSH3, NOW Asrock H97M PRO4. As I said, I have the old motherboard right beside it, and plug in the same things in the sme way and it works fine.
 
By "not plugged in" do you mean not installed in the motherboard, or installed in the motherboard but not connected to power from the PSU?

Is the graphics card installed in the PCI slot of the new motherboard? If so, take it out. That alone can cause issues even if the monitor is connected to the iGPU.

If the card is not installed, and everything works with the other motherboard, then this board is bad and you should return it. There's really no other possible option.
 
Oct 18, 2018
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No, the graphics card was not installed on the board whatsoever. Not even within a foot of it. I feared it was bad. Oh well.