hood6558
Posts: 353 +110
I was bored the other night so I decided to assemble some parts I had laying around into a working system. It was late and I'd had a couple beers, so I wasn't at my best. I had some trouble installing the Hyper 212+, but finally had it all together and wired up. It seemed to boot up fine, all fans spinning, both drives spinning, but no output to video. I knew that all parts came from a working system, tried another monitor, tried a video card, cleared CMOS, reseated RAM, no video! Took it all apart and examined the mobo looking for shorted spots and cracks (nothing I could see was wrong). Went to bed, had nightmares about electromagnetic pulse weapons testing randomly destroying computers all over the world. Got up determined to fix a computer that shouldn't be broken, installed the CPU and Hyper 212+ again (noticed that this time, it lined up the screws much easier and didn't press the heatsink as tightly - looked at the instruction illustration again and realized I had the X bracket on wrong before),"breadboarded" it, and the video works! Put it all back in the case, testing at each step to make sure it was still getting VGA output. It works fine now. The extra mechanical force applied by the X bracket being wrong was enough to stress the CPU or the mobo to the point of throttling the video output somehow. So for all you others who had the same problem (no video after re-assembling good parts), which Googled up in the hundreds, this is one thing you might check. When installed properly most coolers will twist a couple of degrees without too much trouble. If it's rigidly immobile (like mine was last night with X bracket installed wrong) then something's wrong. The lesson learned here is don't drink and attempt to build a computer, even if it's only 2 beers in 3 hours.
