Righto I just put in a new mobo and cpu, connected everything up correctly afaik and start it up. Everything goes for a few seconds, sounds like its working and then it all turns off. Is this an issue of my psu not being rated high enough or something else?
Help greatly appreciated!

Mister Minute should be able to help.

check the fans are spinning, check that the board isn't shorting out on anything

remove everything except the vid card, ram, cpu (bare essentials to boot) and see it it boots.

Take it outta the case and sit it on a box, then try it. Chances are good the board's shorted in the case.

PSU is also a possibility.

all the fans are spinning. All the lights go on and it appears that all is going dandy. Then it just turns off. :/

and also, if the board has shorted... that means it's f***ed right? And was that my fault or was it just a faulty board? I bought the f***er from umart today and would prefer to have not just set $200 on fire :|

nah, very unlikely to have fried it with a simple short.

lucky, otherwise I would have looked like this http://img493.imageshack.us/img493/3130/cry5dy.jpg kid whose daddy loves his civ more than he loves her. Anyone else rofling at this banner?
http://img493.imageshack.us/img493/9843/civianon728x9017fg.jpg

which cpu? which motherboard? first off id say cpu overheat shutdown, chances are the heatsink isnt making proper contact..... if it was an aftermarket cooler then it may have had a plastic coating on the contact surface

i mean its not the coolest of days

last edited by x-yled at 16:18:57 29/Oct/05

AMD Athlon™ 64 3500+ Processor Retail (939)(Venice)and Abit AV8 Motherboard using the heat sink and fan that came with the cpu. There was a square of something or other on the contact surface on the heatsink... I take it I should have removed that? Why did they stick it there in the first place?

If the board was shorted, chances are that it would not start up at all. No noise, nothing. No lights, nothing. From my experience anyway.

No, the square WAS thermal paste .. and should have been left on. It provides a better contact for heat dissipation. Without it your CPU would not do very well.

1. Try doing a BIOS reset

2. Get a huge deskfan and point it at your motherboard. If it stays on longer than without the fan, you have a heat issue.

Was there a peice of tape over the square of heat transfer material on the bottom of the heatsink? If so, you're supposed to remove that...

actually just checked my stock AMD heatsink, and it looks like they dont' have tape over the thermal interface material on the bottom now. So I don't think you did anything wrong there.

parabol: my experienced has showed that shorted boards can start up briefly then shut down, or start up and run all the fans and stuff indefinitely but not POST.

Nah there wasnt tape. I took the heatsink off and wiped all the original thermal paste off and put on a new coating of silver thermal paste, put it back on. Same problem still.

my shorting board would boot without a keyboard, but not with
was totally fine out of case

So say it is shorting, what does that mean? What do I do to fix it?

typically just taking it out and putting it back in the case will fix any shorting - it sometimes happens with the brass standoffs in the case.

you took off the plastic protective strip before you put the heatsink on the cpu didn't you

so if my psu isn't powerful enough (not enough BTU's) then will it start booting at all? Or if thats the problem should it not be turning on at all?

and what do you mean by take it out? Just disconnect everything and re connect? Or actually unscrew it, remove it and put it back in.... How does that fix it?

It doesn't take much power just to boot up so it's unlikely to be a power problem provided it worked fine before. Remove as much as possible from the system like cd-roms, sound cards, USB ports, HD, system fans etc so you end up with basically a MB, CPU and Video with power. Try it now.
From experience the two things that display those symptoms are an overheating CPU or incorrect speed settings in the bios. Sometimes bios won't detect the CPU and Ram speeds properly so you may need to do a bios update. I have only seen this happen about twice however. I have also seen external USB ports because a similar problem so that is why I said disconnect you USB.

ok so if i remove everything cept those things and manage to get into bios, do i have to do anything to update or does it happen automatically

My mate had a mobo that was making contact with the case. After he took it out and put it back in, there was no more contact between the case and the mobo so it was no longer shorted and hence it started fine. It didn't do anything, no lights no nothing.

I bought a Scythe Ninja HS and it came with a transparent, blue tape on the CPU. If you have any tape on the heatsink that isn't made of some sort of metal, it's not meant to be there and you should take it off.

I've tried taking the mobo out and starting it and the same thing happens. I've disconnected everything except the cpu video card and ram but to no avail. So I figure the only possible remaining possibility is that i need a higher rated psu? Is this a possibility? Or if i needed a better psu would it be doing something different. This is really pissing me off. :(

Asus board? For starters, have you plugged some speakers into the onboard sound socket? You'll probably be getting those asus speakeasy (or whatever the name is, i forget) diagnostic. If you've already followed the other suggestions and run your system barebones, then you'll have your problems narrowed down to Mobo, RAM, vid card, PSU, or a short. If you've tried it outside of the case then you'll have eliminated the short. So all you need is another machine you can try out the other components on. Oh, make sure your video card has external power plugged in if it needs it, and the 12 volt extra power connector on your mobo if there is one. Usually the you're pc won't switch itself off if theres a problem with RAM timings or CPU frequency... Oh yeah, make sure you've got the cpu plugged into the right header as well, some boards check for the rpm info off the cpu fan header and shut down if they aren't getting any...

Always harder to diagnose problems when you aren't looking at the system yourself of course.

Edit: You won't need a higher rated power supply just to post. If you ran into stability problems later on then a higher rated power supply might help, but at boot (and running barebones) the power supply shouldn't matter as long as it is functional.

last edited by icewyrm at 18:16:52 29/Oct/05

Make sure you only have one stick of ram in as well. If you have a couple of sticks then try each one individually and try different slots as well.

Have a look on boot up what bios version you have. They go from 1.2 up to 2.4 so that is a lot of revisions and a lot of them have to do with ram and cpu timings.

Here's the link to the bios updates and Abit AV8 is on there somewhere - http://w3t.org/?u=9zs

Make sure you download the latest one for your exact board.

READ INSTRUCTIONS FIRST WHEN UPDATING THE BIOS. You will need to do it from a floppy disk.


last edited by zectbumo at 18:48:47 29/Oct/05

READ INSTRUCTIONS FIRST WHEN UPDATING THE BIOS. You will need to do it from a floppy disk.

Not with that board he wont, asus have an update tool which will update from windows and works quite well.

Reverse your ATX power connector.

Sounds like it's plugged in the wrong way causing it to be shorted for 5 seconds which tells your motherboard to shut down the power.

they only go in one way, shape of the pins+the clip stop it from being reversed

Oh yeah, I just remembered but... I am using an A8V deluxe which seems to have similar specs, mine had to be flashed to the latest version bios using a different core chip before I could use mine. My chip is a winchester core, yours is a venice probably, so not sure if its the same problem or not, but anyways yah mine was unusable until it was flashed. And I returned it to be flashed at one stage and they didn't update to a new enough bios, it was a year before I got the board up and running -_-

last edited by icewyrm at 06:33:02 30/Oct/05

Eds - It's an Abit AV8 motherboard not an Asus A8V and he's having trouble keeping the computer on long enough to boot into windows so flashing it from windows may be a little bit hard. :D

You may want to try setting all the speeds for the CPU and Ram in the bios at the correct or maybe even slightly slower speeds just to get it to stay on. You definitely don’t want it turning off half way through flashing the bios. Make sure you can get your computer stable in dos before you even try.

It doesn't even stay on long enough to get into bios or anything. It goes on for like 5seconds max and then turns off

You can flash any award based bios in windows with This.

EDIT: Sorry reload was refering to others about flashing bios in winblows, as for the op's problem i would of RMA'ed the board on day 1.


last edited by 0z at 12:20:27 31/Oct/05

If I can't even boot at all, is the only way to flash bios by getting it sent away?
Also, what's umart's policy on faulty s***. Will they give me a replacement or will they be c***s like gamedude and make me wait a year or so.

Umart rock with replacements. especially if it's within 7 days - automatic replacement

Reverse your ATX power connector.

Sounds like it's plugged in the wrong way causing it to be shorted for 5 seconds which tells your motherboard to shut down the power.

Sorry not the ATX power connector, the soft power button that goes from your power switch onto your motherboard. It's on the wrong way.

I tried it both ways. Same thing happens both ways. I'm thinking the mobo has to be f***ed. NOTHING else is working. Back to umart tomorrow I guess. :(

Doesn't matter which way the soft power switch goes on either... all any of the switches do is bridge the 2 pins the plug sits on when you hold the button in... although if the wire itself was a bit stripped somewhere it could be shorting on his case, so as soon as he turned it on it would turn itself back off. but then, if that was the case it'd probably turn itself on as soon as he plugged in mains power as well...

You could try taking your whole system along if you like, and demonstrate your problem to them there. They're usually pretty good that way...


last edited by icewyrm at 12:17:42 31/Oct/05

hmmm apparently all I need all this time was a higher rated power supply :(
I even paid the $35 service fee at umart for them to tell me my heat sink wasn't attached properly, when it was. What a huge waste of f***ing time and money.
c***s.

I took it back to umart today because I could have sworn the mobo was simply rooted. They plugged it in with my ram and cpu and tell me it works fine, the only problem was that the heatsink wasn't clipped on properly, which is a load of s*** because I had just unclipped it before I took it to them... at any rate, they wacked it back on with new thermal paste and said the system was working fine. So I'm left pretty speechless and wanting to punch a wall. Anyways so I now fork out another $70 for a new Thermaltake 430W psu because I can only figure mine isn't rated high enough, even when running it barebones. This is on top of the $35 service fee for them to tell me f***all. Get home from work tonight and stick in the new psu. Plug everything in and hold my breath...

SAME f***ING PROBLEM

At this point I'm ready to stab someone and something, including myself because I don't know wtf I've done wrong.
So here's what I know now:
All the hardware (according to them) is fine.
My psu is not under rated.
The system is not shorting as I've tried running it out of the box.
The cpu isn't overheating as I havn't touched it since they gave it back to me having said it works fine.
BIOS doesn't need flashing as they said it's working.

Any new ideas guys? This is driving me absolutely god damn insane. Not to mention it all being a giant waste of time and money. I'm about ready to smash it all with a hammer being this frustrated. I don't particularly want to fork out another $35 for them to tell me it's fine. $70 is a lot of good money that could have otherwise been spent on pretty much anything rather than completely wasted on my own retardedness. :(

So did Umart actualy boot it up and it posted no problem? Did you see proof of this? I would definetly take it back and demand them to boot it up in front of you and if it doesn't then get your money back. You cant really go wrong with a 939 heatsink. I could understand if it was an intel because those heatsinks are a prick to put on.

It is to the point now where you need to test each part individualy in another system. It is a bastard of a thing but what else can you do?

oh man reload yep id take it back to umart and demand to see it boot up...

good luck seems most retailers these days getting fuking stingy with RMA's.

If it works on their end, but not on yours, it could be your house wiring or the cables/point you're using at home...