This post is about my adventures building my own PC. It’s something my wife and I have done many times (although she has more experience doing it than I), but documenting it is a first. Inevitably when building a PC, weird things go wrong in weird ways, and it can be a real bitch figuring out why (because this activity isn’t catered to the “average Joe” but to OEM manufacturers). Anyhow, here are the problems I encountered, and the solution.
The Specs
I am actually not building a new machine from scratch, just swapping out most parts for new parts.
Motherboard: Gigabyte EP45-UD3P
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400
RAM: 2 x OCZ2RPR10664GK (2GB)
PSU: OCZ OCZ600ADJSLI 600W ATX12V 2.01
Video Card: EVGA 8800GTS
Chassis: Thermaltake Armor Series VA8000BWS <3 <3
The Adventure
No POST, no fans, no video.
This was actually on a previous attempt, but I’ll include it here in case it’s helpful to someone. My wife and I put the whole machine together inside the chassis but upon pushing the magic button, it didn’t go. We went over everything we could consider, looked for cracks in the PCB, but found nothing. I called my old man for advice and he suggested taking everything out of the chassis and setting it on a cardboard box, and starting it there. What a silly old man.
The solution: My old man was right. The motherboard was shorting out, and we realized this after we removed it from the chassis and started it up sitting on a cardboard box. It turns out we had screwed in an extra brass stand-off which didn’t match up with any screws on the motherboard. Whoops.
A whining video card
I don’t know how best to describe the sound. It wasn’t a beep like you hear during POST. It was a whine or squeal of non-uniform pitch. Very odd. It wasn’t the fan either.
The solution: PSU wasn’t plugged into the video card. Whoops. Easy fix.
Continuous short beeps
So the first shot failed with contiuous short beeps during POST. According to their manual, this is a “PSU Failure”. My PSU is one of the components I’m bringing in from the old system, where it works fine. I tried it in my old system again, and it still worked fine. During troubleshooting, I stripped everything out of the machine except the necessities (CPU). My PSU was definitely not failing.
I RMA’d the board and got a replacement and encountered precisely the same behavior.
The solution: It turns out some motherboards (this one) ship with low power settings for the RAM. My wife put her RAM in, which consumed .1 less voltage than mine, and it booted up fine. Once in, we were able to hop into BIOS and tweak the settings for my motherboard.
To be continued? After configuring proper power settings for my RAM, we put my RAM back in the machine and tried to boot it up. Back to continuous short beeps. I’m not sure what the issue is here, and it doesn’t help that I don’t know much about RAM timings and settings. I rely on the hardware and low-level software to do that for me. So this may very well be a solvable issue, but at the same time I’m insisting that it’s a “bug” in the hardware or software. This RAM is (at least was, I don’t know if it still is) listed on Gigabyte’s approved RAM list, so I don’t think I should have to change RAM timings and power settings just for it to boot. Ugh.