First time boot up problems

[jmorisaki21]

Good afternoon,

I was wondering if you could give me an idea of a solution for my problem.
I believe I have received a bad motherboard but wanted to know some other
suggestions before I send it back. I recently purchased a AMD Athlon XP
1600+ and an EPOX 8KHA+. I installed that in an Antec SX830 case (300 watt
power supply). I also installed a 3.5" Sony floppy drive, Maxtor 60 Gb 7200 RPM
hard drive, Pine 52x CD Rom and a 24x TDK CD burner.
When I fired up the pc for the first time I received a little power but
would immediately kick off. This happened several times, so I decided to
change the battery on the board. This seemed to fix it. I got power to
heatsink/fans on the pc, motherboard, 4 case fans and other components. The
only problem though is I get FF bios on the motherboard. We tried to change
the jumpers on the motherboard. Nothing helped. So, I took the hard drive,
floppy, cd rom, cd rw and tested in my old pc. They all worked with no
problems. Then, I checked the IDE and floppy cables and they worked
perfectly as well.
I thought maybe it might be the AGP video card. So, I took that out and
threw a cheap 128 bit video card (tested and works) and still get no video
and FF bios code.

Please suggest other ideas before I return for an exchange.

Thanks,

Jimi Morisaki

[Jumby]

This is a little confusing. So, without asking again what you did or didn't do, start with just the motherboard, hard dive and video card. Is the hard drive spinning? Does anything appear on the screen? What is "ff bios"? If you think that could be the problem, take it out and just put it on a table. Make sure everything is grounded.