I couldn’t find my other thread dealing with the question.
Okay, I plugged in my new Motherboard, and it fired up for about 3 seconds. No POST, no nothing, no screen nada. But I started thinking about my power supply. Does anyone know if a 235W power supply would be the cause of this problem? But when I unplug all HDDs and other unessential things, I still get no POST. The RAM was firmly seated, so was the processor. The Case is very old. I got it with a PII 350 about 5 years ago. That was a long time. Could it be so weak, and the power requirements be so great that I need a new power supply? The memory appears to be of the correct type. It is PC 2700 333MHZ DDR. Two sticks of 512MB. Cheapo brand. cost about 104 total. The motherboard is a gigabyte based on the VIA KT333 chipset. So it should work in theory. I plan on taking the parts with me to Germany and to buy a case when I get there.
The power supply is probably the problem. Newer motherboards need more power and reliable voltages than older ones. The motherboard itself could be bad as well, but I’d try getting a new power supply first.
Sounds like a dead PSU. Although a 235W supply is pretty underpowered for modern mainbaoards, it should still POST and boot up with a minimum number of devices installed. Get a whole new case and PSU, like you’re planning to.
okay, but it runs fine with my old KT133 based Athlon CPU (SlotA). Hmm, I wish I could try it. See, I don’t want to wait till I get to Germany, because it will be hard to return stuff then. Does it ever occur that people just get bad motherboards?
I know when I moved my MB over to a new case (with the PSU) it stopped working. It worked fine before, and then it didn’t. Somewhere in the move I must have craked something, or there was a static build up or something. But it didn’t take much cuz I really didn’t notice anything. Oh, one thing to try. When I replaced that MB I went to Best Buy I picked up a new MB and a new processor. (The only carried one type of MB and one type of processor BTW), brought it home and it still didn’t work. I called the MB’s tech support and one of the things he had me do was to take it out of the case, set it on something (ie a phonebook) plug in the PSU and turn it on. He said sometimes if everything’s not just right you can have a problem with grounding. Anyways it turned out that the ONLY MB and the ONLY processor that Best Buy carried were incompatible with each other. How’s that for stupid. You’d think that at least they’d carry something that worked with each other.
You will DEFINITELY need a new power supply. It should be at least 350W, and P4-compatible (that guarantees certain connectors that you will need even on an AMD system). If the new PSU doesn’t fix it, check the RAM, and possibly the motherboard. Generic RAM has a habit of just plain not working at all. What CPU is it? Insure that the heatsink and fan are properly installed and working.
Okay for anyone who wants to know: here’s the solution to my problems. I searched on the internet, and found that a few people with older giga-byte motherboards were having the same problems. It turns out that this particular mobo has an overheat shutdown feature that allows people to overclock without causing damage. My cooler came with a CPU fan and heatsink combo. On the bottom of the heatsink there was a little patch of heat conductive paste. I thought it would be sufficient. Well, apparently it wasn’t. I booted up the mobo without a processor, and it didn’t shut itself off. So I went out and bought a tube of heatsink grease and scraped the past off. I applied the grease and put it together and it all worked, but I think I’ll wait till I get the new case before I start working on things because I do believe that my PSU isn’t strong enough.
So the lesson to be learned is that the little patch of heatsink compound that comes on a heatsink fan is no good. If your mobo won’t shut down if your processor gets too hot, you could fry your processor.
SDRAM and DDR have different edge connectors so unless the MOBO has a set of RAM sockets for each type you’ll have to use whatever fits. And as QED points out, you can’t mix the two types (if you have a MOBO that accepts both).