Please Help! Point Me In The Right Direction 0n MB Fault

[Savage1701]

I went to turn on my Asus P5Q-E and got the following: It started up, but no single beep or BIOS screen. Then it turned off for about 5 seconds, then it starts back up but no BIOS screen or beep, just power to fans, etc.

I have tried clearing the CMOS, swapping out memory, PSU (other known good one does the same thing with the board), RAM (I know it's good), Video Card.

Is this symptomatic of a bad CPU?

Or is this my worst fear - I put the video card from this system into my test bed system, which has a slightly different board, and now it won't even boot, although the original board's lights and the test bed system board lights fire up just fine, and I can even do power I/O and reset from the board. I was literally using this system an hour ago, shut it down, came back to this.

Could the card have shorted out and is now cooking every board I try it on? Have I just trashed 2 perfectly good boards out over a $75 video card?

Or could it be a bad CPU? That is the only part I have not swapped out yet since I wanted to do that last.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[Archean]

I've had similar problem once with my existing Intel DP35DP board but with my older CPU i.e. C2D E6600 (Conroe), however after spending hours after hours it turned out that the culprit was CPU; and i only needed to clean it (carbon) and when i put it back in and powered the system ... everything worked perfectly well. It doesn't mean its the same for you; perhaps something is shorting out; I don't think your video card should kill boards as you suspect. It could be something minor like in my case.

By the way, funny thing was I had already ordered a new motherboard (suspecting this one is dead) when i thought of checking on the CPU

 

[Savage1701]

Archean - I think you are correct. The video board is back and working in the main system. It is Hypermemory, so I may need to run Memtest on my 4 sticks sticks as well. Truth be told, I am a little suspicious of one of them as it came from a system that exhibited some intermittenet strange behaviors but who know - that could have been a fault of the auto settings (I'm not a tweaker on CPU or RAM as my systems are for work and I need them stable. If anything, I would tend to slightly underclock. I also water-cool all my systems to keep temps on the CPU as low as possible, not to mention more fans than I can count) I think it was coincedence that my test bed system blew a power supply (4 years old) because I swapped it out with a new one and the video card and board booted fine. The main system, having a newer power supply, seems fine. It's also an overkill PS because I only run a 4670 or energy-efficient card and just enough drives to get by. They are not gaming rigs sucking up the juice.

I did request an RMA from Intel and was granted one, so I am limping by on an old Pentium D 920 for a couple of weeks. I am also suspecting a defective 3Ware card and am going to move it to the test bed system this weekend when I have an hour or so, and see if that system boots with it installed. I use a lot of the older 9590SE cards because they are decent, x4 workhorse cards that are out of favor, but if this one is dead that will be the second one I've lost and I guess it will be time to go over to the 9650SE's and just eat the cost.

Thanks again for the reply. I appreciate it.

 

[Archean]

You are welcome; if you suspect its the memory stick give it a through workover by using memtest86+, give time for atleast 8+ passes to run.