bahs new pootah not booting :(

[TdC]

guys, some assistance if you would:

today I took delivery of my brand new i7, Asus P6T SE mobo and some OCZ ddr3 ram.

Here's my problem: after putting it all together the PC will power on, all fans spinning, all LED's lighting on my gfx card and the mobo, the disks will spin up and for all intents and purposes I seem to have a live system...

...except that my monitor won't wake from sleep, and none of my usb connected stuff like mouse and keybd seem to work, so I can't do anything. Also, because I have the Antec Sonata Plus 550 case, which Antec -in their infinite wisdom- have not equipped with a speaker to reveal to me the beep codes which the BIOS *may* be trying to communicate, I have no idea what is going on.

Also, after some scary things I read on the interpipes, I re-seated the CPU, and did notice that there seems to be a discolouration in the CPU socket (see attached pic) which may or may not be a bent pin. In fact I didn't spot it for a while because it's almost not visible.

Any thoughts?

 

[Jupitus]

Connected the USB connectors correctly?

 

[kirennia]

Does the harddrive do its thing and constantly tick over while everything is loading up? That is with the presumtion that your OS is intalled. If not, getting hold of a PC speaker will help greatly; I'd recommend it for any build, even if you end up using one from an older case. It could end up saving you postage price of sending back an otherwise working system. Also for more info, what gfx card are you using with it?

As for normal things to check:
1)Check the harddrive is ticking over correctly (not just spinning).
2)Try each stick of RAM you have individually, making absolutely certain that they are seated correctly in their bed.
3)Check the gfx card is seated properly.

I'm presuming you've checked both gfx card monitor outputs, the CPU seating and that the USB connectors are connected right. Not sure whatelse to suggest, sorry

 

[TdC]

trying it with the speaker I just ripped out of an old SparcStation4 I had as junk/doorstop/etc. Tested the speaker on a battery and got white noise, so the speaker works, however it stays dead silent when I hook it up to the pins on the mobo :/

Currently have the whole thing in bits and am testing the dimms one by one. No luck yet :/

 

[old.user4556]

Silly question, but I didn't see it explicitly mentioned - have you stripped it right back to basics - as in, Mobo / CPU / GFX / Mem / PSU / Connected display and absolutely nothing more than that?

 

[TdC]

yes, sorry I didn't say, but currently it's just mobo, ram, cpu, cooler for the cpu, gfx and the usb for the keyboard connected to the psu.

tbh I don't trust the speaker any more either, as I just powered the kit on with a configuration known to cause beeps, eg no ram, and it just turned on and sat there with fans spinning and no beeps.

I've tested two of the three dimms now, and it's not doing anything. I'll do the last one and then I'm giving up and off to bed, as I have a long drive tomorrow.

also, I was just reading in the booklet that Asus recommend a 600W psu as a minimum, and the one in the Sonata is 550W. I'm not particularly worried though, as everything powers on just fine.

 

[Embattle]

I've the Asus P6T Deluxe and didn't have any issues although that was a replacement for a Gigabyte UD4 which did give me a couple of problems which included not detecting all the memory properly but very soon the whole mobo failed. This issue seemed based around a broken/misaligned socket pin, upon looking I could see that the pin looked different and using my finger softly on it I could easily detect that it wasn't right compared to the pins around it.

I sent it back and it was confirmed as busted so I got a replacement but changed to the Asus instead since I didn't fancy getting another Gigabyte in case the memory still had an issue.

Out of interest what is the model of the OCZ memory?

 

[TdC]

OK, I'll call the chaps I bought the mobo from and see about a replacement.

The RAM is OCZ Gold Low-Voltage OCZ3G1600LV6GK according to the invoice.

 

[Embattle]

While the memory isn't listed on the Qualified Vendors List I suspect your socket might be the cause of your problems.

 

[TdC]

yeah Emb so do I tbh. I know the dimms I have aren't listed specifically in the QVL, but I'm going to RMA the mobo based on it not working (presumably).

 

[Bahumat]

Maybe your monitor has a hangover?

Good luck with it TdC!

 

[MYstIC G]

Have you tried turning it off and on again? </IT Crowd>

 

[TdC]

*rage*

 

[Bahumat]

I assume you're using the same monitor from before, so you know it works?

Dont they come with 2 connectors now days? Was gonna suggest using a different one?

 

[TdC]

yeah, everything has been verified to work except the things I can't verify -ie cpu, dimms, mobo.

It's always such a pain when moving standards. In this case I'm moving to a different CPU socket, and a different dimm standard :/

 

[Ctuchik]

you have the SATA/IDE cables hooked up properly?

looks like the exact same issue i've had a few times...

 

[MYstIC G]

*rage*

Good, now... have you tried "Cunting it with a hammer" sir?

 

[TdC]

you have the SATA/IDE cables hooked up properly?

looks like the exact same issue i've had a few times...

it does it with or without disks connected

 

[MYstIC G]

Give full size mb pic ffs.

 

[TdC]

sure, I'll try to make one when I get home

 

[Embattle]

Bottom of this page:

Intel Core i7 PCSTATS Review - Installing a Core i7 LGA 1366 Processor Safely

Not sure it is worth bothering with though.

 

[TdC]

oh jeez I don't know about that. I'll give it a shot though. Carefully o0

 

[Scouse]

Put a higher res picture up m8. Of the socket, not the mobo.

 

[TdC]

holy fook I fixed it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111one

I stared at the socket for about 10 minutes trying to work out what the discolouration was. Sadly I didn't have anything like a magnifying glass or some such, and the pins are pretty fine not to mention that only one was slightly bent.

Ok so the pins look like the letter L, except they're lying on their backs so to speak, and the whole thing is angled at 45deg or so. the whole thing, not just the pin itself. Anyway, what I found was that the pin itself was slightly bent towards it's own base, meaning that it would be pressed away from the cpu so to speak.

So, the scary, sweaty and potentially expensive bit came where I took a needle (you really need something that small and tiny) and from the other end of the L so to speak I slowly and carefully worked the bent thing back to a somewhat more erect state...all the while deathly scared that it would snap or whatnot. Anyway, it didn't and now I have graphics and USB again! So, let the awesome installation of windows 7 begin!

 

[Noc0de]

holy fook I fixed it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111one

I stared at the socket for about 10 minutes trying to work out what the discolouration was. Sadly I didn't have anything like a magnifying glass or some such, and the pins are pretty fine not to mention that only one was slightly bent.

Ok so the pins look like the letter L, except they're lying on their backs so to speak, and the whole thing is angled at 45deg or so. the whole thing, not just the pin itself. Anyway, what I found was that the pin itself was slightly bent towards it's own base, meaning that it would be pressed away from the cpu so to speak.

So, the scary, sweaty and potentially expensive bit came where I took a needle (you really need something that small and tiny) and from the other end of the L so to speak I slowly and carefully worked the bent thing back to a somewhat more erect state...all the while deathly scared that it would snap or whatnot. Anyway, it didn't and now I have graphics and USB again! So, let the awesome installation of windows 7 begin!

You are a brave man sir!

/salutes

 

[Bahumat]

blimey! I hope nothing goes wrong in the future

 

[Embattle]

In essence due to the fact the socket contains the pins such problems happen now and then. As you can see in the above picture the red arrow points at the part of the pin that is vertical and designed to make contact with the processor, the larger part of the pin you can see is actually semi fixed into the plastic of the socket base but it is the bit that seems to pop up sometimes thus shifting the vertical pin out of position.

 

[TdC]

sorry guys I have to report failure even though the thing now powers on and I have gfx, it's uber unstable and gives me BSOD's when I try to install Win7

oh well, RMA here I come :/

 

[TdC]

woo result!

after a weekend of moping about feeling miserable, I got a tip from the shop to try hard setting my DRAM voltage value at 1.65V

well, the pc seemed to be back at square one because it didn't want to power on again, so I took it apart and built it up outside the case with just the gfx card, mouse and kbd usb in and one hdd. Now it magically booted up, and in the BIOS I looked at the 3 or 4 values I could use to influence the voltage for the dimms aided not at all by the most unhelpful booklet. After a bit I decided that DRAM BUS voltage was the most likely candidate because that was the only one which didn't cause a screen full of horrible warnings to occur.

anyway, after some fruitless googling, I set that to 1.64 (as 1.65 wasn't allowed) and for good measure hard set some timings that I read off the dimms 8-8-8-24/1T and the dram speed set to 1600MHz. To my considerable surprise given the performance of the thing in the past week, eg being broken, it powered on, Windows 7 installed and did *not* BSOD and then suddenly I was in an installed, booted and configured '7 which was working! OMG!

well suffice to say I don't really trust it atm, but who knows the hard setting of the dimm voltage may have been it. I'll watch it for a week and then let the shop off the hook if it stays working. I'll also overclock the hell out of it, but hey, that's for laters

 

[Embattle]

It might be a compatibility issue because your memory and board even if we did think it shouldn't cause a major issue perhaps we were wrong

The reality is every so often a BIOS tends to appear to improve memory compatibility, for example the P6T Deluxe has had 5 BIOS updates that include some improvement to memory compatibility but so far none of the ones released for P6T SE include this.

Fingers crossed either way