Help for newbie building first PC

[Guest]

Help!! I decided to take the plunge and try to build a PC. Ordered all the parts and put it together last night. It booted up great and I loaded Windows 2000 before going to bed.

Got up this morning and apparently the gremlins had some fun in the middle of the night. Upon boot up it gave me a long beep then shut down, which, according to my MB manual I assumed was a video card issue. I reseated my video card and from that point on, could not get any beeps or video. Nothing but black screen. Disconnected everything non-essential (one item at a time) to try to isolate the problem. The only sound I can consistently get is when the memory chip is removed. Then I get repeated long beeps. I even took the heat sink off the CPU and put some more thermal goop on it.

Any suggestions about what I should do? Do I have a bad processor, or motherboard?

My specs are:

Soyo Dragon Plus! MB
AMD Athlon XP 2000+ chip
PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 425 ATX power supply
Lian-Li PC68 case
Thermaltake Volcano 7 Copper Core w/heat sensor
1x 512 DDR (Crucial)
Visiontek Xtasy t9500 GeForce 3
Etc.

THANKS!

 

[Kanaz]

Nice machine...have you tried removing everything and starting for scratch?

If so...It sounds as if a part is bad (Video Card, Motherboard, RAM, CPU, Power Supply. In that order of likelyhood). If any of your parts are OEM I would suspect them first.

Another thing to try is NOT hooking up your HDD, CDROM or Floppy and seeing if it POSTS (ie. VC, MB, RAM, CPU only)

Hope it works out for you

P.S. I found that the chances of parts dying are doubled if you buy them from the internet.

"The greatest pleasure in life it doing what other poeple tell you you can't do."

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the help. I tried what you said and it still didnt work. Unfortunately several of my components are OEM, and I bought everything off the internet. =( I am going to call the motherboard tech support when they open on Monday. I have a feeling it might be a problem with the CPU or MB. The heat sink fit real tight over the CPU -- maybe it damaged it??

 

[Kanaz]

Possible the heatsync could have damaged it, but if you see no chips or marks then probobly not.

Heatsyncs now-a-days are much more tightly fitting than they used to be.

FYI, the Volcano 7 fan you have is a fairly loud fan, see if you can get a retail fan, you'll appreciate the drop in decibels(sp?).

-Kanaz

 

[pat]

boot while holding the 'INS' key. Maybe the FOC cannot sence your CPU fan and shut down the computer. Check that the CPU fan is connected to CPUFAN1 connector. this connector is the one that has FOC and it need to have a fan connected to it in order to start the system. Holding the 'INS' key just bypass the FOC. You have to go in the bios to diseable it.

-Always put the blame on you first, then on the hardware !!!

 

[Guest]

Thanks Pat and Kanaz for the suggestions. I'm still stumped though. With everything disconnected except for RAM and VC, I get one of two responses: 50% of time I get a short beep, followed by a long beep and shut down; 50% of time there is no shut down, no beeps, no video. When I hold the INS key down when starting, I consistently get no shut down, no beeps, no video. When I remove the VC and the RAM, I fairly consistently get steady recurring beeps, correctly indicating a RAM problem. This thing is a puzzler because it doesn't respond the same way every time. Based on the shut down issue, I wonder if I have a heat sink sensor problem (the Volcano 7 has a yellow sensor wire that connects to the CPUFAN1 and a separate red/black power connection to the case's power supply). But then, like I said, half the time it doesn't beep or shut down. While the INS key does seem to prevent the long beep and shut down, it still doesn't get me anywhere with the video or boot up. I'm beginning to wonder if I have multiple bad parts.

 

[pat]

Looks like a grounded motherboard too. check that it does not touch the case behind the motherboard. Try it outside of the case

-Always put the blame on you first, then on the hardware !!!

 

[Guest]

I called Soyo tech support yesterday and apparently I have a bad MB. Hopefully that fixes the problem and I'm not just sending away a perfectly good motherboard =P.