EP45-UD3P wont even post

I am having a problem with the gigabyte EP45-UD3P motherboard, its not even posting, i have done everything i have read on here, and its only turning on for about 1 acutal second then turns off and just repeats that over and over again. i have a Q9550 processor in this motherboard, and checked for bent pins and found none, tried to boot with only 1 stick of ram, still nothing. Never had this problem until i started with gigabyte motherboards. If anyone can help me out, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time

What I posted in this thread may help you.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] s#t1976558

Thanks for your reply, and yes i have tried all of that, and yes the cpu fan does run for that slight second it will turn on. all six lights on the motherboard turn on too. And i have tried it on a different power supply too. This was never a working system, i just put it together the other day. I just didn't know if it was the cpu or the motherboard. i figured one of the two is bad.

Well, nothing's shorting out then, but I wonder if you have and need a good ground? When ATX M/Bs, PSUs and "soft" power switches first came out, I had trouble with getting them to do anything but make a slight bump/thunk as they powered up then nothing. I built a real "board", wooden with a ground wire from the rigged metal post near Power Supply and had no problems. I'd screw in that one hole, one with silver ring around it, to ground it.

I was surprised recently when my old AOpen board ran fine without a ground. I could be wrong here, but there is a grounding issue of some sort when bread-boarding these motherboards. Others here know more than I do. Of course, you may have tested it in the case first. (I was reading another thread and jsc posted link to a boot problems page - good to read. He also mentions bread-boarding and doesn't mention a ground, so I'm likely wrong on that. http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/foru [...] _13_0.html )

The necessity for the 'board mount' grounds is because the case grounds established are connected to a 'board layer' that shields the high speed traces from capcitance developed to the case's mounting plate - high speed (and these things are beaucoup fast!) signals are prone to 'skewing' from any stray capacitance effect, which interferes with incredibly finicky detection timings and rise-times. If the board is not in a case, this factor is not an issue; if it is, this is always a good idea:

Some of it on water - just to get rid of the heat! (I mean, out of the room it's in...)
http://www.sevenforums.com/68978-post410.html

Dayman I hope you get your issue resolved and not too expensive.

Bilbat I checked out your link and the pics are nice....but if you went with a better case so you could stuff alot of that wire behind the mobo you'ld be better off...
later...JQ

I have never done any special grounding on any of my breadboarded systems. And I always breadboard a new build. My last four builds used Gigabyte motherboards: (in no particular order) an EP45-UD3P, an EP45-UD3L, a G41M-ES2H, and an EP35-DS3P. I always install the OS and I always run Prime95 for 48 hours before I put everything in a case.

I have over 40 years experience maintaining military electronics systems so I know about proper grounding procedures. I just have never had any problems with simply grounding the motherboard to the PSU through the PSU cables.