Help Please-Recent upgrade of mobo, processor leads to no boot up

[lancero]

Hello,

Recently purchased an Core 2 e6400 processor and ecs PT890T-A mobo combo at Fry's to do an upgrade. Additionally, bought a new Antect Neo HE 500 ps and 1gb DDR 5300 memory (specs said use 4200, but fry's guy said 'shouldn't be a problem')

I put everything together with and went into BIOS, made some setting adjustments, and looked like it was rebooting..got to XP logo and cpu rebooted and got just past the screen that tells you the drives you have and then cpu went dead. (total on time including bios was about 4-5 minutes)

Now, when I try to do anything to get it started i get zero. No drives, fans, lights, beeps. Every now and then I get the flutter of the cpu fan for an 1/8 of a second.

Tried my old power supply same thing...including flutter of the cpu fan.

Thoughts or ideas? everything seems to be well seated. Of note, when removing the cpu fan and chip, there appeared to be a grayish paste on top of the chip and bottom of fan...scrapes off with fingernail.

Thanks for your time!

[mjc]

Thoughts or ideas? everything seems to be well seated. Of note, when removing the cpu fan and chip, there appeared to be a grayish paste on top of the chip and bottom of fan...scrapes off with fingernail.

Yes, that is normal...that was a thermal paste or the remains of a thermal pad. It is needed to ensure thermal conductivity between the heatsink and CPU.

If you didn't reapply any paste the heatsink may not be doing its job.

The good news is that many motherboards will deactivate if the temperature gets too high. The bad news is, that some don't...

You may have an extra crispy CPU on hand...

One way to know is to swap parts with known good (like put the CPU back into the old motherboard, if it is still working...)

If it is just a motherboard sensor protecting the system, applying a new coating of paste and making sure the fan is connected properly and resetting the CMOS (jumper or pull the battery) should get you back in business.

[crisis]

yea i had same problem not long ago, and it was due to lack of thermal paste,

[saphalline]

I put everything together with and went into BIOS, made some setting adjustments, and looked like it was rebooting..got to XP logoYou didn't try to boot your old WinXP installation from your new hardware, did you? If so, that doesn't work! Windows installs specific drivers for your hardware when you first install it. Moving that initial installation to new hardware is like putting your brain in a different body while you're asleep. Once you wake up, things go crazy like Freaky Friday! Changing your mobo will require a reinstall of WinXP.

But that's not the root of this dead system problem. This is obviously a hardware problem, not software. Take out your CMOS battery and strip that system down to barebones. See if it boots. If it does, enter the BIOS and let it sit for awhile. If it can stay on while in the BIOS for 10-15 minutes, then you know the basic hardware is relatively stable.