First Build: Boot up Issues

[JayMiller8080]

Just finished my first build last night. All in all I would say it went pretty well, especially considering when I turned it on, it didn't blow up in my face. It is however booting up oddly.

When I turn it on, everything seems to work fine for about 3 seconds. Then it shuts off. Then three seconds later it boots right back. Three seconds later, off again. It will do this over and over without me touching a thing.

The LEDs on my motherboard indicate that the system memory is working fine. The other one is a blue LED for standby which my manual says will be on as long as the motherboard is receiving constant power. The BIOS is by Phoenix Award (I assume that's what that is ).

What would cause this? How should I test it? Any help is appreciated!

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Here are my parts:

Power Supply: Corsair 750tx (750w, non-modular)
Motherboard: EVGA x58 ATX LE
CPU: i7-920
Graphics Card: EVGA nvidia GTX 260 Superclocked edition
RAM: Triple Channel OCZ DDR3
HDD: Western Digital 1tb Caviar Black
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If I left any details out that you need, I'll do my best to answer. Thanks!

 

[brady]

xp / vista / 7 ?

 

[JayMiller8080]

Haven't even had a chance. This is the FIRST time booting this system. There's nothing on it yet. It will be windows 7 if I ever get there.

I did however, plug two 6-pin PCI-e cables from my power supply into my video card and its staying on now. I'm not getting any video though. The LEDs on the motherboard say everything is working fine.

 

[MindoverMaster]

Try resetting BIOS, there may be a misconfiguration in there.

If you don't know how, take out the large watch battery, wait a few minutes, then reinsert.

 

[brady]

Can you connect your system speak so you can get a beep count when booting?

With the new connection to your GPU, has anything changed? ex: time it takes to reboot itself?

Do your fans spin up? system / GPU / CPU?

Do you see the post? If so, can you enter "setup"?

 

[JayMiller8080]

Not being able to see POST is precisely the issue. Everything starts up and its not having the re-booting itself issue anymore. But yeah the fans turn on, CPU fan turns on. It seems like everything is working fine, except being able to see POST.

 

[MindoverMaster]

Well, first when you turn it on, the first thing it checks is your graphic card.

 

[brady]

Has this GPU ever worked properly before? Not completely uncommon for a vid card to be bad out of the box.

Do you have another card? pref pci-e? for testing purposes?

or another computer you can put this card into to see if it will at least let you view post?

 

[JayMiller8080]

This is a first time for every part in this system. I don't have any other parts or computer I can test it on. =/ I'm on Tech-Forums on my laptop.

 

[brady]

ok well unfortunately the next step is to start testing the hardware.
From the sounds of it we've narrowed it down to video... which we would now test.
possible MOBO PCI-e/PCI - or bad GPU

You can unplug the hard drive (power) mainly.
Any other cards you have on the PCI-/e (power) to see if this changes anything... such as led lights... etc.