Board is MSI Z87-G41. Processor is Intel i5-4670K. OS is Windows 7 Home Premium. Home build, maybe 10 months old.
When I press the power button, everything powers up, but nothing comes up on video. At first I thought it was failing to POST because I never the get the BIOS splash screen, but now I’m wondering if there is an issue with the on-board video. Disks spin up, fans come on, when I put a W7 installation DVD in the drive it sounds like it’s reading it. Monitor works with another machine.
How can I diagnose this? I know enough to build it but not enough to fix it
The simplest way would be to plug in a dedicated graphics card and see if that works. Did you test the monitor on the other machine using the same cable?
DVD drives check the DVD in the drive at power on … so the spin up doesn’t mean that the BIOS is trying to read the DVD.
If the video is failing, then the motherboard emits a beep code.
These days there is no speaker to beep.
So perhaps attach a speaker to hear beep codes ?
But like, yeah if you don’t get any video you need to fix the video. Of course the problem could be bad CPU ram or motherboard, and of course if its impossible to know which unless its working well enough to say.
I googled this problem and found a series of troubleshooting steps on Tom’s Hardware. First I used a multimeter to test all the voltages on the 24-pin connector, and everything checked out. Then I removed the CMOS battery to force a reset. And oddly enough, that did the trick. It came up first notifying me that the CMOS had been reset and giving me the option to go into configuration mode, then Windows came up perfectly with the option to resume its last saved state.
