The XMEN Clan Forums

Anyone here have suggestions why I get no display on boot. Monitor functions fine on another machine. New mainboard, processor, memory, hard drive and vid card. No display to even get into the bios! Board is an Abit, P4 Prescott 3gig 800 fsb, one gig pc3200, 200 gig seagate ata100 hard drive, ATI Radeon XT700 pci express x16 vid card. I even tried in an old pci vid card and still nothing comes to the monitor. Any suggestions what to try next?

This might sound dumb...

Does your motherboard have a PCI express slot?

Are all of your cards seated properly?

What happens when you power it up? (Any beeps or flickers of the screen?)

Is your monitor cable plugged into the proper video display port on the card?

Do you have enough power in there? (At least 500 watts?)

Reset the CMOS first. Try that.

Are you getting any Beep/POST codes...no noise?

Reseat the memory also.

this is for my father in law....he is upgrading his bosses computer for him!!!
monitor says "no signal"....same as if not plugged in.
no beep codes at all.
yes, pci express x16 slot.....did same thing with old pci card in regular pci slot. only reason he got the pci express card was because that was what the mobo he bought had.....he was expecting it to have agp.
no other cards installed to seat.
will reseat the memory and try them one at a time when I get home, will reset cmos too.
500 or 550 power supply
vga plug into vga socket.
I am taking another pci vid card home with me and an old hard drive that I am pretty sure still has win 98 or 95 on it to see if I can boot with it. I may pull the mobo out and try running it with minimal connections like on a test bed....nothing but ram, cpu, power connection, old HD, one floppy, old pci card and see what happens. I may have to pull the cpu out again too but it looks like it is a positive seat and can only go one way....LGA775 I think. It is different from the socket 478 that is on my new mobo. Open for more suggestions though.

Does your vid card require power a power connection?

A regular PCI card won't work in a PCI express slot. The spacing and width of the connections is different.

Did the PCI express vid card become partially unseated after putting the screws into the case? Sometimes this happens.

Is the power supply out of a Dell? If so, the motherboard is likely fried, unless the motherboard is a Dell also.

Is there only one VGA connection (9-pin, dsub connector) on the video card?

Does the motherboard have two PCI express slots of equal width meant for a video card? (two x8 or x16 slots) Technically, the card should work in either slot, if this is the motherboard you have, but there may be an issue with the card being in the wrong slot.

Is the video card a real honest to goodness PCI express card? The AGP bus and PCI express bus are similar in appearance, and if the PCI express slot is big enough, the AGP card will fit in but won't work. (My brother's friend tried this.)

Will come up with more questions... taking a break from an online class I'm trying to finish off for work. I stayed home sick today, but still have work to do.

When I've seen this sort of thing, either something's fried or, more likely, there's a short or unseated component somewhere.


Pull the RAM and all cards off the mobo. Disconnect all drives. Ensure the dinky PC speaker is hooked up or that there's an on-board piezo. Only things now connected to the mobo are the speaker, power on, and reset wires. Oh, yeah, and BOTH power connectors - the big 20-pin and the little square 4-pin power connector too. When you turn it on it should beep at you. If not, you've got problems.

Next add memory. Repeat the process. Should beep at you still, but differently - this one meaning "I ain't got no video!"

Now add the old PCI vid card, still no drives or other stuff. Power on.

Try all the above like they said. Check the mainboard standoffs in the case too, you may be having an issue with an extra one hiding under there shorting something out. I've had that happen to me with new cases before.

Like SH said, I have pulled the MB out and found out that it was shorting on a misplaced mount. Pull it, check all the mounts. I have fixed problems like this also by just loosening the mounting screws and shifting the motherboard, apparently one of the mounts was touching a circuit.

Thus is the world of building computers.

thanks for all the help guys. Long story short......bad mobo. Exchanged it for another and all went just fine although the boot cd from seagate that came with the HD wouldn't boot......cd drive wouldn't boot to it but the window OS cd booted and from there the formatting etc went just fine. I am looking forward to seeing what this vid card does....it is a true pci express x16 from ATI with 256 megs.......if all is true about these, it should scream when it runs. I will try to remember all of your advice when I finally have the time to do my upgrade. I already have all the hardware except for wanting a new vid card....will have to be satisfied with my gforce mx400 for a while longer. I do have one question......I will be using a new WD SATA 200gig HD for my boot drive when I do the upgrade.....can I run this without setting up RAID? will it be recognized same as if it were IDE1 and if so, can I run my old hard drive just for storage on IDE1?
My new stuff will be: P4 Prescott 2.8 gig 533 bus, Asus P4P800E Deluxe, 2 512 mb PC2700 ram 400mhz, WD SATA 200 gig HD and all the same old stuff from before.

Yes, you can run your SATA as primary, and you don't need RAID. I'm running this configuration. You just have to give your SATA drive a higher boot priority than your IDE drive.

cool....just a matter of boot sequence in the bios?

Pretty much.