SPCR

G'day all,

I know there are many more experienced builders than I out there. I'm building a system for a friend and have everything installed, but it isn't booting properly - the monitor never switches on. The system is:

AMD Turion MT40
Zalman CNPS7000 AlCu
Seasonic S430
MSI RS482M-IL motherboard
2 x optical drives and 2 x hard drives (including a 2.5" WD Scorpio and a 3.5" 160g Seagate)
old PCI graphics card

When switched on, the power supply and CPU fans come on and all drives spin up. But the monitor doesn't go out of standby and that's as far as it's ever got.

I suspected the graphics card, so I tried it in my AMD XP system and it did the same thing (monitor not coming on). But now a second PCI graphics card has been tried and is doing exactly the same thing. So now I'm downright confused. Are old graphics cards incompatible with newer systems? Could the CPU be a problem?

Cheers!

Do you have your monitor connected to the onboard video or your PCI video? I imagine you have a BIOS setting that is diverting to the onboard video first (primary display?)
I'm not familiar with this board's BIOS.
Try disconnecting your old PCI card and connect the display to the onboard VGA out and post back your results.

Are you sure the MSI board plays nicely with Turions? You might need to flash the BIOS?

Hello,

To help find the reason for the problem, you should try to get a POST with just one stick of RAM, the CPU, and use the onboard video. If it posts, then go into the BIOS and toggle it to boot from the PCI video card. Try it with that; then add one hard drive and one optical drive.

If you can POST with this, then install Windows with just this set up, and add the other bits later. Windows gets very confused if you have more than one hard drive installed, and you might end up with Windows on something other than the C: drive...

Cheers for the replies guys! To be honest I thought this motherboard didn't have on-board graphics. That could be the problem. I chose this board specifically because it was proven to work in an SPCR article.



I'll check this out and let you know how it goes!

G'day guys,

Looks like this system has me pwned after all. The board certainly does have VGA, but when I plugged the monitor into the mb VGA port, it did exactly the same thing. Only with the VGA cable unplugged will the monitor switch on and display the 'check cable signal' screensaver.

The next experiment was to unplug the non-crucial drives and RAM. The result was the same. I even resorted to reading the instructions but there was nothing noteworthy there. Finally, I removed the CPU altogether and switched on the machine... and once again, everything switched on except the monitor.

So I dread to say, there seem to be question marks over this Turion/MSI combination after all. Either this CPU is a dud, or the mb is not compatible in this case. I have another MT40 chip on the way - if that has the same problem, it will be safe to say the easiest way out of this mess would be to look at a Sempron or similar. D'oh!

If anyone has any other suggestions/comments I'm all ears though.

Cheers!

Update, the other Turion chip did the same thing. Next up comes the fun part... buying a Sempron or similar...

Update, the other Turion chip did the same thing. Next up comes the fun part... buying a Sempron or similar...

It's a real shame the Turions didn't work out for you; but on the plus side, I have a Sempron 3400+ running at 1.8GHz @ 1.1V which runs below 30C most of the time with an 80mm Yate Loon @ 5V, they really are excellent chips from an SPCR perspective, I don't think you'll be disappointed this time!

PS. Remember only Sempron 3000 and above have CoolnQuiet.

Cheers for the info... I went with a Sempron 2600 but ended up going back to the original plan.

Even the Sempron was initially not booting, and I looked something like this -> . Then I changed monitors again and suddenly it fired up at last! Then I installed the Turion and now it works perfectly. It's actually recognised as a Turion, runs at the full 2.2 GHz and has Cool N Quiet.

I still don't know exactly what the problem was, but at least I didn't end up looking like a n00b.

I'm hanging onto the Sempron for when I build my Turion system.