[s37d]

Hey guys, I have a pretty serious problem with a computer I'm trying to get working. It's a friend of mine's pc, and I recently acquired it from him. The stats that I know of are its a p4 2.0 with a geforce4 ti4600 video card, and sb live! audio card, not sure of the motherboard. I'm using my own seagate 40gb hd. Anyway, heres the problem. After hooking everything up and turning it on, there is no visual. You can see and hear that the power supply is powering the video card as well as the other components, but there is no display on the monitor. I took the video card out and tried it on my main computer, and it worked fine. For one reason or another the motherboard just isnt giving the monitor a visual. I've built only one computer before this so I'm not very experienced, and I had trouble finding which wires go where for the power button and power button led etc, the mobo isnt labeled very well and not at all in some places. I'm not sure if this set of wires would have anything to do with the video card or display, I'm assuming it doesn't. Any help would be appreciated...this same vid card and mobo worked fine at friends house, only difference now is a change in hard drives. Just not sure whats wrong and I'm starting to lose my mind, thanks.

Edit: The motherboard is an Intel D850MV, if that helps at all.

[TECHGUNS]

I dont think its the hard drive cause you should still see the bios displayed booting up even with the hard drive cables unpluged.

If someone overclocked the processor or memory in the bios to high, this is what will happen, totaly dead display.

Try reseting the bios, look for a three pin jumper block on the mother board move the jumper to the other pins for few seconds and then back where it was.

Its usually close by the battery, but not always.

I hope it works for ya.

[s37d]

Thanks, just reset it, but with no luck. I'm sure this computer was not overclocked at all, which is why I cant figure out why its not working. Could it be because one of us working with the computer gave it a static charge and fried something? Could we have pulled too hard on the video card slot and broken it somehow? Everything looks fine just cant get a signal.

[TECHGUNS]

Yes I worked on 2 PCs last year that had bios damage from Lightning.
A static discharge with do the samething.

Always ground yourself by touching the metal PC case whenever working on it.

The bios is the only thing that I can think of now.

If someone can think of something else post.

[TECHGUNS]

It only take about 400 volts on any of the mother board chips to burn a miroscopic hole through silicon.

If your walking on carpet you can have a few million volts of static charge on ya.

If the problem started when ya were working on it that could be it.

Its best to stay away from carpet, plastics ect, while working on static sensitive stuff.

I keep those silver looking static bag to keep my extra cards in and that helps also.

[s37d]

Yeah, I'm not sure what to do, it has to be the motherboard though since the vid card and monitor are fine. :-(

[TECHGUNS]

You should still see the bios diplayed during booting even with the processor chip, memory and all the drive cables unpluged so I think it has to be the MB.

[TECHGUNS]

Do you hear any sequence of beeps like one or two beeps.
Its a code that can help you if its doing that.
I dont have the book that tells me what those codes mean with me now, its about 15 miles away.

[s37d]

Yes actually when I first started it up it beeped 3 times, so I downloaded the motherboard manual from Intel.com and 3 beeps means a 64k memory error, so I had to move the 2 sticks of ram to the first 2 slots from the last 2 slots that they were in, and then the error went away. After one restart, no more beeps. This didn't fix the problem with the display signal, though.

[TECHGUNS]

If its not beeping anymore I cant think of anything else.

Its probably another damage chip on the MB because the bios is what does the beeps.

I lots of people handle static sensitive stuff without protection and a little static damage might not disable it untill years have past. I think its called delayed static damage.

I have a lot of experince with ESD working on millitary cards and I handle them with protection by habit, but for someone that dosent do it everyday that habit is hard to learn.

So if your going to replace it stay away from stuff like carpet and ground yourself by touching the metal case with one hand, save the static bags to put your extra cards in.

Good luck with getting it going.