A7N8X Deluxe Dead?

[Protoplasm72]

Yesterday I turned on my pc and it almost finished loading windows when the monitor lost it's signal and went black. I tried to reboot but no joy. It doesn't post or even give any error beeps. I tested my ram and video card in another machine, I pulled out all none essential components like the sound card and it still won't post. The psu is a brand new OCZ modsteam 520 watt so I don't think it went bad. I checked the voltages on the 5 and 12 volt with my voltmeter and they were both good. I'm not sure where I can test my 3.3 v from. The hard drives are also brand new SATA drives in a raid 1 array but even if they went bad it shouldn't stop the pc from posting.

Is there anything else I can try or is my mobo dead? I didn't check the cpu mostly because it is a huge pain to unbolt the heatsinks on 2 machines and swap the cpu's. I can do it if there is a reasonable chance that it might be causing the problem. I would think if it was the cpu the mobo would still be able to give error beeps though.

[XStorm]

I would unplug ALL drives from power and data

you would be surprised what can keep a machine from posting... I recently saw something like this in the shop

XS

[Protoplasm72]

Ok, I'll try that when I get home.

[Protoplasm72]

Nope, still dead. I tried to boot with nothing but the mobo and cpu and didn't get any kind of beep.

[Protoplasm72]

I pulled everything off the mobo and tried to boot it up (with a different power supply) and didn't even get a beep out of the thing. If you try to power up a board with nothing at all plugged in it should give error beeps, right?

[Ford Freak]

I am guessing you have reset the BIOS. If you can't get it to work after that, I would look over the whole board to make sure nothing is fried or shorted and make sure everything is seating properly. If it was me, I would reseat everything again. If you have reinstalled everything already, I would rule out the seating problem. From what I could tell, it doesn't have a speaker on the board. I am also assuming you left the case speaker hooked up when you disconnected everything else to test it.

[Protoplasm72]

I did reset the bios and I left the speaker attached so I would of heard any beeps. However your post reminded me that after I reset the bios I should of heard the vocal post message. The vocal post is more detailed and tells you when no cpu is installed. I wanted to turn it on but couldn't get into the bios and i forgot it goes on by default after reseting the bios. The reason I didn't hear it was because it comes out the onboard sound output, not the pc speaker or the pci sound card that I normally use.

I plugged in a speaker to the onboard sound and heard the no cpu message. I plugged everything back in and tried it again and heard the message "Memory failed test" or something like that. I pulled the RAM and put it in another machine and ran memtest and it was fine. I put the ram from the good machine in to the A7N8X and got the same memory error. So it looks like the board is shot.

Thanks for the help

[Protoplasm72]

Well it did it again. I got my replacement motherboard, plugged everything in and it ran fine for about 2 hours until the screen went black and it refused to boot up. Exactly the same thing that happened to my other motherboard. So obviously my motherboard was blown since the new one ran for a few hours before dying but the question is, what is killing my motherboards??? The newest component besides the now dead motherboard is the OCZ Modstream 520 watt power supply. Right now that is my biggest suspect since it could be spiking and toasting my mobo's.

Is it possible that my cpu? video card? sound card? or anything else is killing my mobo's? How would I figure this out without putting my other machines at risk? My profile lists all the hardware in this machine.