I am a middle aged woman trying to help my newly turned 12 year old son build a custom PC. I had a family friend (Electrical engineer who has built 50+ custom PCs and Hackintoshes) over yesterday helping us build the thing, after the week or so of waiting for all the parts to come in from newegg, et al. Very exciting (I have pasted my parts list in at the end of this so you can review what we have installed).
We seem to have installed everything correctly (famous last words). Thing powered up. But when we plugged in the video monitor to do the boot, the video screen is saying no video signal. The one thing I did NOT have on hand was an hdmi cable (argh). Family friend says that connecting from the computer to the monitor with an hdmi may be the fix we need so I'm headed out later today to get that when stores open. But I thought I'd put it out to the group here -- what do YOU think is happening?
Things we have tried yesterday --
1) switched video card to a different PCI slot
2) reinserted the RAM
3) connected from the video card to the monitor
4) connected from the motherboard to the monitor
Thing family friend says to try if the hdmi cable doesn't fix it -- reinstall the CPU which my son says is impossible since we'd have to destroy the fan clips. Is this true? And yes, my son is in tears. This is/was his very expensive birthday gift. We're not giving up but it's not a breeze like the newegg tutorial. Friend also says if something was wrong with the motherboard we'd get an error message stating that on the ASUS monitor splash screen when it was booting.
Hope someone has time to think about this. Our parts list is below --
1) CPU: Intel Core i5-3570 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($194.99 @ Newegg)
2) CPU Cooler: Arctic Cooling Alpine 7 Pro 36.7 CFM CPU Cooler ($24.98 @ Newegg)
3) Motherboard: Asus SABERTOOTH Z77 ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($239.98 @ SuperBiiz)
4) Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($64.99 @ Newegg)
5) Storage: Crucial M4 128GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($119.99 @ Microcenter)
6) Storage: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($94.99 @ Newegg)
7) Video Card: MSI Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition 1GB Video Card ($99.99 @ Microcenter)
8) Case: Cooler Master HAF 922 (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case ($79.99 @ Newegg)
9) Power Supply: Corsair Enthusiast 650W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply ($69.99 @ Newegg)
10) Optical Drive: Lite-On iHDS118-04 DVD/CD Drive ($21.98 @ Outlet PC)
11) Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (OEM) (64-bit) ($89.98 @ Outlet PC)
12) Monitor -- Asus VX238H 23.0" Monitor (Manufacturer Asus, Part #VX238H, Screen Size 23", Recommended Resolution 1920 x 1080, Widescreen, Aspect Ratio 16:9, Viewing Angle 170° H x 160° V, Display Colors 16700000, Brightness 250cd/m², Contrast Ratio 80,000,000:1, Response Time 1 ms, LED, Built-in Speakers, HDMI 2, VGA 1
PCPartPicker part list:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/12PrN
Price breakdown by merchant:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/12PrN/by_merchant/
Benchmarks:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/12PrN/benchmarks/