I need opinions from those of you who do this frequently.
I am actually an aspiring PC technician, (no certification yet, but studying for my A+). Not a lot of "hands on" yet either. This is the first time I've posted to the forum.
The problem is, I'm trying to hand build my first computer and I've run into a problem that's really got me stumped. Here's what I've got:
brand new Soyo 6BA+IV mainboard
OEM PII 450 with a generic CompUSA heatsink and fan
64 meg stick of Seimens PC-100 ram
Voodoo3 2000 agp
all in a Addtronics tower case with a 250 watt power supply.
Got it all put together. Double checked everything. I turn the monitor on, it goes into standby mode like it should, waiting for the PC to be turned on.
Next I hit the power switch on the case - fans run, hard drive spins up, brief flash on the keyboard lights, but...
The monitor never comes out of suspend mode, no post, keyboard won't work (can't even get the caps lock to light up.)
So I took everything apart, tested the cpu, ram, and video card in a second system. They were all functional. Sent the mobo back and they tested it with the cpu and said it booted up fine.
I put it all back together and got the same response from it. I removed the floppy drive, CD drive, hard drive, and all their respective cables one at a time and replaced them with units from my old PC that I knew worked...nothing.
I tried booting up with just the CPU, RAM, and video card...nothing.
I removed the mainboard and placed it on the plastic bag it was shipped in, hooked it up with just the above three components. Still no post.
Tried a new power supply from CompUSA...nothing.
There's one more little episode I need to tell you guys about before I turn it over to you. At first I was trying to get it to boot up without the heatsink and fan on the CPU. I went ahead and put the heatsink and fan on the CPU and plugged the fan connector into the mainboard, Shazam! It posted up and stayed alive long enough for me to set the bios, partition and format the drive, and install Win98. I thought my problems were over...
I removed the heatsink and fan unit to put some thermal paste on it, and when I put the CPU back into the socket, the machine was dead again, just like before. I've reseated everything again and tried everything I know but I'm all out of ideas, completely stumped.
One last thing, when it was running for that short, glorious period of time, I thought that it was odd that as I put my hand close to the heatsink (and yes, I was wearing a ESD wrist strap) the cpu fan would slow as would the case fan in the front.
Just very odd over-all, and extremely discouraging to someone who thought he actually knew a lot about computers. I guess that taught me huh :)
I apologize for the length of this but I really need help from you guys out there. I've spent a ton of money for something that I can't get to work and it's not going over good with the wife ;)
Thank you very much,
Jeff Crowson
I'm stumped. Does this sound like the power supply to you guys, and if so, why? I'm trying to learn all this stuff but it's kinda frustrating when this happens the first time you try.
Any help is appreciated.
Oh, by the way, don't know if this makes a difference or not but the mobo says it requires a power supply that's ATX 2.03 compliant. The power supply in the Addtronics case has a sticker on it that says ATX 2.01 compliant. Maybe?
Thanks
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