Did you jump pins 14 and 15, which is power on
with just a known good drive as load?

"Chris Stolworthy" wrote in message
...

"BrianBloodaxe" wrote in message
...
How do you get a motherboard and an atx power supply to come to
life?

I hope this is not too obvious a question. But basically I've never
built
a
pc before so I don't have any experience. I've fitted extra memory,
drives
and cards but I've never built one from scratch.
Anyway here is the background info. Recently I acquired a pc that
had
died.
It wouldn't power up. There were no beeps or fan activity from the
power
supply unit.
The computer uses a standard atx power supply and motherboard. It
was
taken
to a pc repair shop and they tried it with a new power supply, which
didn't
work, so they concluded there was a deeper problem.
Anyway I bought a new power supply and tested it with the new one,
but
nothing happened. I had the same problem. However the fan on the
power
supply came on very briefly (1 sec) then all activity would stop.
To make sure the switch on the pc wasn't faulty I shorted the power
jumper
and nothing happened. So I thought the motherboard must be faulty.

I bought a cheap similar motherboard off eBay and I cant get this
one to
work wither.

My question is If you have got say just a motherboard and an atx
power
supply and nothing else, no hard drive, memory cpu etc. When you
connect
the
power supply to the atx power socket on the motherboard should the
power
supply come to life with the fan spinning if the power connector
jumper is
connected to a switch on the front of a pc case?

The motherboard I bought is a 'Gigabyte' GA-6WMM series Intel 810
AGPset.
If
that means anything. I placed it on a table (with nothing connected
to it)
and connected the power supply to it. Nothing happened (as would be
expected) however I looked through the manual and found the PW(Soft
Power
Connector) jumper. Am I right in thinking this should connect to the
pc
switch?
I shorted this with a screwdriver to simulate a switch action. But
nothing
happened. (I was very disappointed).
I then attached various things (cpu memory, pci cards) and placed
the
motherboard in the old computer case and connected the switch
connector to
the PW jumper. But again nothing.
Have I missed something. If you were building a pc from scratch and
had
just
bought a motherboard (as i had) how would you tell if the
motherboard was
ok
before assembling the entire thing?
Thanks

my first inclination would be to shunt the PSU to make sure it works
properly...cqan't rememre off hand which pins it is you need to shunt
tho...
Then if PSU works I would try mobo with CPU and 1 stick of good ram
ONLY!
Make sure the heatsink is installed the proper direction, (alot of
people
install it backwards which can cause POST issues) try cleaning thermal
grease from CPU, and reapplying a thin layer. See if that breathes
any life
into your sys...