My Gaming Rig is Dead (or at least comatose). Help w/ diagnosis?

[croSSeduP]

I was doing some GPU troubleshooting w/ SLI. Now the machine will not post at all. Here are the things I know are NOT the problem after pretty extensive troubleshooting: GPU's, PSU, monitor. I reset CMOS and it still won't post. What could be the problem? Could the motherboard be bad?

Before you ask, here's what I was doing w/ the GPU's. I noticed that my SLI'd 570's were not performing like SLI'd 570's while playing BF3. There was no difference in performance w/ one 570 or both in SLI. I know SLI was working because my Unigine Heaven benchmark scores showed it, and the NVidia control panel showed both cards in SLI. I confirmed both cards were working separately by running games and benchmarks w/ only each card by themselves installed. So, I updated the firmware on both cards, put them back in SLI, booted rig,,, No post. From there I tried everything including installing a different GPU, PSU, reset CMOS (as already stated), tried monitor on another machine,,, All of this tested as everything working fine. My only conclusion - in my limited knowledge of these things - is that the motherboard took a dump. Could I get your opinion please? Thanks for any/all help.

 

[Slaymate]

You updated the video cards firmware??? Could you elaborate more on this?

My 1st guess would be that you killed your cards.

 

[Fat.Clown]

try flashing them back one at a time to the original firmware (hope you made a backup).

 

[croSSeduP]

No problems with cards. Everything is working again, sort of magically. I did a bunch of troubleshooting, swapping parts I knew worked I had on hand, etc., and the rig just slowly started working again. I can't say there is anything I did definitively that fixed the problem. All's good now! Thanks for the replies.