Greetings,
After apparently one of my motherboards decided to stop working I decided to upgrade my computer, and finally learn how to build one myself.
A bit of backstory on this:
Since I have warranty on the old motherboard, they took it in order to test it but they have not managed to test it yet. Basically over the course of the week before it died I kept having more and more hangs and missed POSTs, and eventually it stopped POSTing every time. Either way once we opened it up we found one of the little fans (probably the southbridge cooler, I'm not sure) stopped working. The keyboard also was not receiving power, but the motherboard LED would power on. (OTT the motherboard was an A8N-SLI)
Now, I bought a e8400, 2X1gigs of 667mhz patriot ram, and a P5KPL-CM motherboard. I specifically wanted a microATX board since I probably will buy a LANbox later on.
Now this is the first time I'm putting something together, but I've done a LOT of reading up on this subject and used the utmost care when putting it together.
While I was putting it together I realized that one of the screwholes on the motherboard did not have a corresponding spacer hole under it. I decided to leave it without a screw, thinking it is unimportant.
The LG775 cooler was kind of hard to push in though, I was worried I might crack the board pressing it down!
Now once everything was put together I plugged it in, pressed the power button, and heard a small chirp. Oh dear.
After thinking I shorted something and panicking a lot, I double-checked everything to make sure I did not cause any horrible damage to the motherboard because of some gross mistake I've made. I couldn't find anything done wrong, but noticed the following things:
- Two of the top cooler pins are inserted, but seemingly not all the way. Like I said I was worried about pushing down hard upon them, hearing the motherboard creak like that. The CPU did have preapplied paste on it.
- The power led plug from my chassis is three pins wide, but my mobo only has two pins one next to another. I decided this is not critical and never plugged it in.
- The power led on the motherboard lights up when the PSU gets power, but like I said, fans do not spin up, no activity when I even try to short the power pins with a screwdriver.
- No visible damage (burns, cracks, etc)
Now, I have realized that the PSU might be the problem since my last motherboard exhibited similar symptoms, but the reason why I came here is that I am worried that I might have caused damage to the motherboard or CPU somehow.
Is a slight cooler misalignment enough to cause the motherboard to not start up at all? Or any of the above things? What I am thinking right now is that one of the rails coming from the PSU is dead, powering up the internal LED but not giving enough power to start it up. I just want other people's opinions on this, since I'm really worried I might've blown up about 400$ worth of upgrades.
Thanks in advance, guys.
After apparently one of my motherboards decided to stop working I decided to upgrade my computer, and finally learn how to build one myself.
A bit of backstory on this:
Since I have warranty on the old motherboard, they took it in order to test it but they have not managed to test it yet. Basically over the course of the week before it died I kept having more and more hangs and missed POSTs, and eventually it stopped POSTing every time. Either way once we opened it up we found one of the little fans (probably the southbridge cooler, I'm not sure) stopped working. The keyboard also was not receiving power, but the motherboard LED would power on. (OTT the motherboard was an A8N-SLI)
Now, I bought a e8400, 2X1gigs of 667mhz patriot ram, and a P5KPL-CM motherboard. I specifically wanted a microATX board since I probably will buy a LANbox later on.
Now this is the first time I'm putting something together, but I've done a LOT of reading up on this subject and used the utmost care when putting it together.
While I was putting it together I realized that one of the screwholes on the motherboard did not have a corresponding spacer hole under it. I decided to leave it without a screw, thinking it is unimportant.
The LG775 cooler was kind of hard to push in though, I was worried I might crack the board pressing it down!
Now once everything was put together I plugged it in, pressed the power button, and heard a small chirp. Oh dear.
After thinking I shorted something and panicking a lot, I double-checked everything to make sure I did not cause any horrible damage to the motherboard because of some gross mistake I've made. I couldn't find anything done wrong, but noticed the following things:
- Two of the top cooler pins are inserted, but seemingly not all the way. Like I said I was worried about pushing down hard upon them, hearing the motherboard creak like that. The CPU did have preapplied paste on it.
- The power led plug from my chassis is three pins wide, but my mobo only has two pins one next to another. I decided this is not critical and never plugged it in.
- The power led on the motherboard lights up when the PSU gets power, but like I said, fans do not spin up, no activity when I even try to short the power pins with a screwdriver.
- No visible damage (burns, cracks, etc)
Now, I have realized that the PSU might be the problem since my last motherboard exhibited similar symptoms, but the reason why I came here is that I am worried that I might have caused damage to the motherboard or CPU somehow.
Is a slight cooler misalignment enough to cause the motherboard to not start up at all? Or any of the above things? What I am thinking right now is that one of the rails coming from the PSU is dead, powering up the internal LED but not giving enough power to start it up. I just want other people's opinions on this, since I'm really worried I might've blown up about 400$ worth of upgrades.
Thanks in advance, guys.