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General discussion

Help with new built PC

Dec 3, 2003 6:43AM PST

Ive put all the bits together, mother board, ram... and the other bits

It started up first time fine, after being on for about 5mins in locked up

then every time i turned it on it locked up quicker untill it wont turn on at all.

If i leave it off for a bit, The prossess repeats

I tried changing the heat paste under the heat sink- no diff

I tried changing the bat on the mother bnoard- no diff


Can anyone help, whats wrong?


PC Spec

AMD 2500 barton, asus a7v8x
crutical ram 3200/ddr400
westen digital hard drive(80gb)

Discussion is locked

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You able to get into the BIOS?
Dec 3, 2003 7:55AM PST

I have the same motherboard, and it automatically shuts down when it hits the heat threshold that's set in the BIOS. I suggest you set everything to default settings or fail-safe settings to see if you can boot. I'm thinking it's possible that the temperature threshold is set too low, or more possibly, you didn't apply the thermal paste and heatsink properly( which will cause the overheating and auto-shutdown.) You really only need a small dab of the paste in the center of the chip, and gently attach the heatsink- these chips are pretty fragile and can crack if you apply too much pressure. Try cleaning the chip and heatsink with rubbing alcohol and and starting over. Hopefully you didn't fry the chip or motherboard, see how things go for a bit if you're able to boot-up, go back into the BIOS and set the multipliers, etc. to what they should be. Good luck.

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Re:Help with new built PC
Dec 3, 2003 11:43PM PST

I was not any more tho

the monitor just stays on stand by now

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Re:Re:Help with new built PC
Dec 4, 2003 7:27AM PST

Is the power supply working? You can tell if the fan is blowing- but still not necessarily a perfect indicator that the PSU is fully functional. Check the seating of all power connections. What's the wattage of it? I'd say you should have at least a 400 watter; personally, I go with a *minimum* of 450 watts. Check the recommendation for your particular chip, and double-check that the PSU is one that's recommended for that chip. Still, even with a 300 watter, I'd think you should at least be able to boot.

Well, you may want to try this- this is what I did after the the big blackout when my system wouldn't boot:

1.Check the seating of all the power cables; especially the one going into the motherboard.
2. Check the caps on the BIOS pins, I think pins 3 & 4 should be capped, not 1 & 2, but check your manual.
3. make sure the PSU is working- if you have another unit to test it in, you can try swapping PSUs.
4. take out ALL the harware, except for ram and cpu (use the onboard video) and see if you can get into the BIOS- if you can, your PSU, chip, and ram should be good.

Oh, did you double-check that the cpu and heatsing/fan was installed correctly? Clean off old paste and re-apply? My gut feeling is it's your power supply, or the cpu- the usual suspects, but a bad pci device can prevent you from booting also, that's why I'm suggesting you try going barebones.

Report back; others have ways of troubleshooting, and I may have overlooked something.