PCTech Forums

Hi everyone, I am building my son a new pc i have a pcchips K7 mobo fsb 333, ddr 266, an AMD athlon 2500+ cpu, an Ati radeon 9200 128mb graphics card, 512Mb branded mem 266 ddr, and an 80 gig seagate harddrive, i put them all together and cannot get any kind of output to the monitor, the pc sounds as if goes through the motions but nothing is appearing on screen, so i tried using just the mobo's on board graphics but still nothing, am planning on sending it back but just wondered if anyone had any suggestions ideas b4 i do. I have built numerous PC's but never had this problem. I have also tried Jp 1 flashing bios then setting back to normal, but to no avail.

Thanks in advance for any and all replies or advice good or bad.

You mentioned that the PCChips has built in graphics, and you also said you have an ATI 9200, which I'm assuming is a seperate card. (I've not seen the 9200 built into any motherboars)

If they are sep cards, make sure that if the 9200 is plugged in, that you have your monitor plugged into the card, and not the mobo. If you want to plug into the mobo, you'll likely have to remove the 9200 card. Built-in grapics are almost always AGP, and if you put in another AGP card, the built-in card will be disabled. AGP can also be tricky to get working sometimes. I have run into several systems where the card would not work unless fully inserted into the slot... on the flip side I've seen cards that wouldn't work fully inserted, and they had to be lifted up about 1/16th of an inch.

Does the PC ever make any noise? Generally if a PC is going through it's disgnosic process and passes, it'll beep once, then try to boot an operating system. If you have a bootable floppy or CD-rom, you could insert it and see if it actually is trying to boot or not... if you don't see a lot of access to the drive, there is likely something else wrong.

The other big problems that I could see are the CPU and RAM. RAM can be a pain in the butt... especially cheap ram. Generally the cheaper the ram, the less compatable it's going to be. Cheap ram is designed with a specific system in mind.. it'll work with pretty much only that system. If you aren't fully confident with the ram you have, I'd stop by your local computer or office store and buy some off-the-shelf ram, and try it. If it doesn't work, you can always return it.

The CPU on AMD Athlon chips is very fragile (one of it's very few bad points). If you aren't extremely careful with the installatoin of your heatsink, you'll crack the CPU's core, or break off a surface mount resistor.

Well that should keep you busy for a little while :-)

You might also check the motherboard manual to see if there is an on board jumper you have to set to disable the on board video.

Try returning the MB--I would never recommend buying a Motherboard with video on it.

Probably the only reason they are even sold, is that big computer assemblers like Dell, can shave about $50 off of a new system using onboard video or if you are building a server, any video card will do (you don't even need the monitor once the servers up and running).