Just got a new system to put together from Newegg:

p4 2.6c
Abit IC7
512mb OCZ pc4000
Zalman CNPS7000A-Cu
Antec Truepower 480w
Radeon 8500 (will upgrade later!)

So, a little background: this is the fifth system I've put together, so I would like to think I know what I'm doing from the hardware perspective as far as making the proper connections, etc.

Ok -- put everything together last night, turn on the juice, and no boot screen! Power comes on, but nothing on the moniter. Praying that my radeon has finally bit the dust (and thus an excuse to upgrade), I plug it back into my old system (Athlon 1700+), and eveything works fine.

Next I start pulling out all cards (modem, NIC,..) and try again. Still nothing. Pull all the IDE channels. Nothing. Pull the ram. Nothing. At this point it's just the Mobo, CPU, and video card, and I still can't even get a bootup screen!!! I'm guessing that the mobo is DOA. Could it be the CPU? If the mobo is functioning properly, and not the CPU, shouldn't I get a boot up screen with errors?

Thinking about swapping in a radeon 9600 and seeing if this makes the difference (the mobo doesn't support agp 3.3v, and the 8500 is a 3.3v (2x) or 1.5v (4x) card -- maybe it's not switching over to the 1.5v setting and thus screwing up the mobo?? FYI - The 9600 is only a 1.5v or 0.8v card.

This sucks. Please Help.

P.S. Obviously I was aiming to seriously overclock this board, given my hardware setup. Not too happy about the fact that I cannot even get it to boot at the spec speeds.

Remove the CPU & try.

PS. Welcome to TechSpot. Hope you enjoy your stay.:wave:

Hope I was clear about the "poweer comes on" part. What I meant was that all the fans start up, LEDs come on (even the mobo has two status LEDs, one for power supply status and one for power "on" status -- they both come on).

Thanks for the advice -- not really sure why I didn't already try that one.

Pulled the cpu, and still no boot screen. Mobo must be dead... guess I'll have to go through the RMA process! Can't wait.

Does anybody think that it's even worth checking into possible video card issues before I return this thing?

The board should've done a specific beep to signal the CPU error or if there's some sort of "speech" system, it should've said CPU test failed ( or something of the sort ).

You can always try with a PCI VGA card, but I don't think you'll be any luckier.

check you've got no bent pins, and taking the RAM or VGA card out, you won't get a boot up screen no