nitrous9200

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Mar 17, 2007
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Yesterday I was trying to diagnose the reason why a PC I built for my friend using a K9N Neo-F motherboard wouldn't turn on. First I cleared the CMOS, that didn't work. I tried disconnecting everything but the necessary stuff, but it still wouldn't turn on. I took it out of the case and it did nothing. I checked the polarity of the power switch, and tried the reset switch in case the power button broke; that wasn't the problem. I even checked the power supply by shorting the power good to a ground and the PSU was fine. I did notice 1 out of 50 or more tries, the fans etc. would power up for a split second then shut right off. When testing the mobo I also noticed the cpu fan would sometimes spin up for a second as well, and the light on the LAN port would come on for a short time as well. I called MSI support and after a few minutes of troubleshooting, they said the board was bad. When I first built the system I noticed the chipset's heatsink got very hot, so I wonder if the chipset died and the board went south with it. In any case, do you guys have any other ideas about what was wrong? I won't be able to go back to work on the computer for a few days, and it is completely disassembled. We were planning to RMA the board to MSI, but I wanted to check to see if anything else could have gone bad. Thanks.
 

Ibanezrg570

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Aug 23, 2007
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I would still look at the PSU as a possible culprit. I had a generic PSU go bad on me once and it did some strange things too. I could not boot my system but every time I would hit the power button the front power light (green LED) would blink leading me to believe the PSU still had power. Tested it with another PSU I had kicking around and it powered everything up. Try to test that MB with a new PSU before you RMA it, or RMA it anyhoo, nothing like a new MB for free :)

Cheers