K8N Video Signal Stopped?

[wheel]

I have a 1 1/2 month old k8n mobo which seems to have stopped sending
video signals...right in the middle of using it, both monitors gave
"power saving mode" signals, and have never shown an image since. I
first thought it was the video card but I've swapped that out with a
known good one and didn't help. Are there any alternate ways to
interpret the apparent lack of a video signal? On boot, no bios shows,
nothing. Powereing the monitors on and off just shows the power save
mode image for a couple seconds.

 

[Mike]

no video card would cause the system to beep to report a video problem...
assuming you have the internal speaker plugged in properly... try w/o a
video card to see if it will beep, and then with to see if it still beeps

when powering the system, any beeps? keyboard lights flash?
remove RAM... does it beep?

maybe remove and reseat everything... cards... ram... cpu...

 

[wheel]

Thanks for responding...

Pulling the ram out gets me beeeeep-beep-beep

Resetting the ram gets me...well, now it boots, with video etc.

Prev to this (during problem) no beeps, couldn't get to bios or
anything.

First time I've seen this sort of thing, altho it must be fairly
commonplace, you pointed me to this as a checklist item..so does it mean
that everything is going to be ok? How could the ram be seated so badly
that it bails out in the middle of operation? What I'm getting at is,
statistically, is it likely that the reseat of the ram is a real
solution? Or is it likely that either the ram or the mobo are bad, and
that reseating ram coerced them to work for a bit???

 

[Mike]

no real way to tell if this is something that could become a bigger issue,
or is just an odd thing to not worry about... if it were to keep happening,
I'd worry...

 

[Paul]

I have a 1 1/2 month old k8n mobo which seems to have stopped sending
video signals...right in the middle of using it, both monitors gave
"power saving mode" signals, and have never shown an image since. I
first thought it was the video card but I've swapped that out with a
known good one and didn't help. Are there any alternate ways to
interpret the apparent lack of a video signal? On boot, no bios shows,
nothing. Powereing the monitors on and off just shows the power save
mode image for a couple seconds.

Have you tried "clearing the CMOS", as per the procedure in the
manual ? The computer should be unplugged while you do it, to
guarantee that there is no +5VSB on the motherboard.
The weirdest symptoms sometimes get fixed by clearing the CMOS.

A stuck reset switch might account for your symptoms.
You can temporarily disconnect it and see if the symptoms
change.

A busted power supply could also account for the symptoms.
Is there a funny smell coming from around the PSU fan,
like something burnt ? The power supply is the most likely
thing to fail on the computer, followed by a hard drive.

If, say, +3.3V failed, there would still be +5V and +12V
to run the disk drive, and the +12V would run the fans.
But the motherboard wouldn't run without +3.3V .

If the other outputs failed, you'd likely notice something
funny going on with hard drive/CD drive/fans.

So, a simple check would be to swap the power supply, for
any spare you happen to have lying around. A better check would
be to use a multimeter to measure the voltages on the ATX
20 pin connector, but that is pretty hard to arrange while
all the hardware is assembled. (You could do like the auto
mechanics, and equip one lead of your multimeter with a
needle, and pierce the insulated wires from the PSU one at
a time with the needle, to contact the conductor inside
and measure the voltage. Just be careful not to short
two conductors together while doing it. I clip the black
lead on the multimeter to a screw on an I/O connector on
the back of the computer, as that should be ground potential,
and the lead stays out of harm's way.)

After that, I'd be kinda stuck to suggest anything else
to try. And swapping components one by one, is expensive,
and a poor way to proceed. And yes, I've actually had to
do that once, and I didn't like it. I ended up with
lots of spare parts.

Paul