Built New system, No video signal. Need HELP! PLEASE!

[xenotrop]

Gents and Ladies,

Last night i assembled a new rig alongside of my brother. We each used identical parts for the build.

ASUS P5Q Pro LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard
CORSAIR DOMINATOR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066
Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
SAMSUNG Black 22X DVD+R
Two SAPPHIRE 100245L Radeon HD 4850 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 in Crossfire
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler

For my part it was smooth sailing, turned it on installed the OS was fine, except for a short initial scare that the old as monitor i have to use for now wasn't working or i was not getting any signal from the computer.

Unfortunately my brothers rig has not turned out as well. We go to boot his up, we have power to all pieces and parts, you can hear as well as see everything getting going, but then there is absolutely nothing to see up on the monitor, not even a black screen. For some reason we are not getting any signal from the rig to the monitor. Tried a different monitor same result.

Now seeing as i only had limited time before i came into work i was only able to run through a few things. I tried all of the ports on the back of the cards (all 4). I tried switching which PCI-E 2.0 slots the cards were in and tried getting a signal from a single card being placed in the mother board as opposed to two. Power is obviously getting to these cards (their fans are able to get going). I am inclined to say that i do not think that BOTH the video cards are bad, just to make sure i will switch out the ones in my rig for his when i get home from work.

Things that could be related or not, he did drop one stick of the RAM at one point during installation, do not know if faulty RAM could cause a loss of video signal.

I double checked all of the connections in his machine and they are secure.


Any advise or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!

Thankyou

 

[shortstuff_mt]

do not know if faulty RAM could cause a loss of video signal.

Faulty RAM can most definitely cause a loss of video signal. That's actually the first place I'd look. Try booting with just one stick of RAM installed. If it boots, manually set the timings and voltage to the manufacturers specs and run memtest86+ for a few hours. If one stick passes memtest, try the other stick and both sticks together. I bet you'll find memtest errors. You also might try the RAM in different slots. I just helped a friend with a build where one set of RAM slots was dead, but the other slots worked fine.

 

[evongugg]

Clear the bios for 30 minutes.

 

[evongugg]

Did you plug in the 4-pin power connector?

 

[xenotrop]

Yep the 4 - pin is in, 8 pin in this case. i have to thank you both for responding. Unfortunately my job believes that it should give me 14 hours days 3 days in a row right before thanksgiving, so i have not been able to get home to try any of the suggestions the both of you have given, which i greatly appreciate and will try all of them.

I have a feeling my brother may have reversed the direction of the reset and power button connectors which i have heard can prevent your machine from booting properly if at all.

 

[kubes]

I had this problem before and was stumped for hours why i was not getting signal. evongugg was right on with what I did wrong. There is 20/24 pin connection for the motherboard. There is also (looking at a picture online of your board) a 4 pin connection right next to the cpu on the left side of the board. Make sure you have that plugged in.

The other plugs would be to the vidoe card. Check to make sure you have the 6 pin connector on the vidoe card plugged in. These are all easy to overmiss.

If these are all securly plugged in check to see if plugging the monitor into the other dvi port does anything for him. I have seen this be an issue on other computers. Make sure he's plugging the connection from the monitor into the right card.

 

[xenotrop]

On the Asus P5q Pro the 4 pin power plug has the option to be an 8pin if you remove the tiny little black cap which i had to because my power supply only came with a 20pin and 8pin no 4, unless i am able to use only half of the 8 pins on that plug to achieve for (is that standard practice?). Ill double check since we were doing this late last night. The 8 Pin is working fine with my rig, but conversely i do not know if it is affecting my brothers - we have identical pieces.

Unfortunately i have tried all four of the dvi ports, i know i had issues finding the right one with my own rig but for his non of them seem to be producing results.

I double checked the PCI-E power connectors this morning while rotating the video cards hoping that was it but they looked pretty secure .

 

[kubes]

try using one card at a time would be the next step. See if the crossfire is causing the problem.

Sorry I didn't look hard enough at the picture. Yes you want to plug that in using an 8 pin.

 

[xenotrop]

Thanks for the info guys, i cleared the bios for him and we have removed one stick of ram and a graphics card and got the rig up and running. Now i am going to try and get the rest of those bad boys back into the machine and see if things work out. Ill let you know!