Which of these CPUs is most productive?

[mdettweiler]

Originally Posted by lavalamp

On the ends of the plugs for the front panel connectors, it should say what each does, but even if it doesn't you can tell by the colour of the cabling what the polarity is. Most are a colour and a white wire, the white is -ve (or ground actually), the colour is +ve. The motherboard is also colour coded and should also say what each of the pins do in REALLY small writing, but it's written bigger in the motherboard manual.

Note that sometimes even the manual is not too helpful (as they are sometimes not clearly translated from the Chinese)--my computer's motherboard came with such a manual and even though I believe it included a diagram, I (nor a relative with electrician experience who was observing) couldn't make heads or tails of which way it went. Of course, in that event, trial and error should still do the trick as always.

In my case, as it turned out, I must have plugged it in backwards since neither the power or HDD light on the front of the case works...I never actually bothered to try it the other way since the computer is in my bedroom and it's actually a little nicer to not have a little flickering HDD light shining in my face all through the night.

[lavalamp]

Indeed, I do not have my power or HDD activity lights plugged in. For some reason they decided to use the brightest blue LEDs available. It's like being in the film Skyline.

In any case, the ASRock motherboard manual seems reasonable enough:
http://download.asrock.com/manual/880GM-LE.pdf

Front audio, LED and power/reset pinouts are given on page 25 of the manual, and the speaker pinout is given at the top of the next page. I heartily recommend not plugging the speaker in though, it's just annoying.

[Christenson]

As I said, the question was about the polarity of the front panel LEDs, not the motherboard half.

The smoke test isn't going well...I guessed correctly that the common color on the front panel cable (white) was negative, so the power on LED works. But I get nothing on the VGA port, and no indication of activity from the known working USB CD drive with known working Ubuntu basic boot CD, with or without the SATA hard drive plugged in. Fans also work. A proper keyboard is plugged in the PS/2 connector on the back; it's LEDs all blink on when the switch on the power supply is flipped.

What to do next? Do I need to put a boot floppy together? Clear the CMOS memory? Do these things not like it if the CMOS battery isn't working? (A coin cell is there, and I don't see a little pull-out tab to turn it on, but I could be wrong) Unplugging the reset jumper doesn't work. Or was I supposed to stand the motherboard off from the case a bit, rather than screw it directly in?

[mdettweiler]

Originally Posted by Christenson

... Or was I supposed to stand the motherboard off from the case a bit, rather than screw it directly in?

Ah, that would do it. If the mobo is in direct contact with the case there is probably something shorting out. (Hopefully nothing was damaged by this... ) The mobo should have come with a little bag of brass standoffs and screws. You need one standoff for each screw hole on the mobo. (The case should have plenty of holes to put them in, to fit a variety of mobo configurations. Sometimes the case will not have a hole for one or, more rarely, two of the mobo's screw holes; in that case, just leave that one out.)

[lavalamp]

It depends on the case whether you need to use standoffs, if the holes that you need to screw the motherboard to stick out on little humps, then no you don't. The other possibility is that you had a flat plate with screw holes in, and it would be very difficult to attach a motherboard to the case without standoffs. I very much doubt you'd get any activity from the board if you'd managed that, pretty much everything would short out at the same time. Also the ports wouldn't line up with the I/O shield in the back of the case.

First of all, make sure the RAM is in correctly and you've plugged all of the power leads into the motherboard that it requires. These are easy enough things to check before moving on. Another vital component to check is the CPU, but that's a little harder to get at so save that until other avenues have been pursued.

It sounds like the BIOS may be set to output on the other video port by default, so if you have a DVI to VGA converter (probably one came with the motherboard), I'd try using that.

If you happen to have a spare PCI or PCIe graphics card, you may also want to try it in the PC, you may get some video output that way, then you can get into BIOS and alter the settings so it uses the onboard video.

As for clearing CMOS, it wouldn't hurt to try that. You need to unplug the computer, wait for the power to drain from the motherboard (some LED will probably fade out when that happens), then use the clear CMOS jumper just under the button cell battery. Page 22 in the manual details the process a little more, but basically you just move the jumper over, wait, then move it back.

Since you don't have any screen output right now, this is one of the rare occasions when connecting the speaker may actually help. With most boards a single beep means everything is fine. If on the other hand you get some series of long and/or short beeps, that'd be an error code which you'd need to look up.

[mdettweiler]

Originally Posted by lavalamp

It depends on the case whether you need to use standoffs, if the holes that you need to screw the motherboard to stick out on little humps, then no you don't. The other possibility is that you had a flat plate with screw holes in, and it would be very difficult to attach a motherboard to the case without standoffs. I very much doubt you'd get any activity from the board if you'd managed that, pretty much everything would short out at the same time. Also the ports wouldn't line up with the I/O shield in the back of the case.

Ah, okay, I didn't know that. All of the cases I've built computers in needed standoffs...though now that I think about it, a couple of older computers that I've dismantled did have the raised screw holes as you mentioned. (I guess it didn't occur to me at the time just why the screw holes were raised... )

@Christenson: in that case, if lavalamp's suggestion of checking the other monitor output port (if there is one--most integrated graphics chipsets I've seen only have one VGA output) doesn't work, try it with one of the RAM sticks removed, then the other if it still doesn't work. I once had a DOA RAM stick that caused exactly what you're seeing when I tried to boot up the machine for the first time.

[Christenson]

I've been reading and re-reading that manual for the Mobo. It says the Mobo requires a 12V connection and the 24-pin ATX connection...done...but no meter to put on the pins just now. I did dismount the CPU cooler; to my dismay, I pulled the CPU out of the ZIF. To remount I pried the CPU off the heatsink, inspected the pins, re-installed it carefully, and re-mounted the heatsink.

Two sheets of paper under the Mobo for insulation don't work...the case (a Rosewill) has nice little cones that raise the board to the proper height. There are no beeps from the annoying little speaker device. The manual claims that unless you do setup, the VGA and the DVI connector will have the same signal. The new monitor does change state when the power switch changes state or the VGA connector is plugged in.
So, I'll try:
Clearing CMOS
One or the other RAM stick
My "spare" video card is currently tied up in the older PC, which is taking its sweet time with resizing and moving an NTFS partition (it finally recognized the CD drive somehow, so it booted the Ubuntu CD; once the partition is moved I'll get ubuntu installed on the EIDE hard drive; possibly we can use that for a test hard drive -- current ubuntu issue is not recognizing the USB wireless adapter).

[Rodrigo]

This thread has turned into a very useful compendium of practical tips and details and warnings for system builders. If I ever decide to put my own PC together, I will be sure to consult this!

Rodrigo

[Christenson]

Rodrigo: We haven't spoken of ESD protection much here, but it's necessary...and I also ended up spending $10 (US) at the auto store for some really short phillips screwdrivers to get the screws in behind the riveted-in drive bay which will hold the hard drive. I haven't done this yet because I'm still trying to wake up the MoBo.

[Christenson]

Pulling out ram sticks doesn't work.
Clearing CMOS means the fans now turn on whenever the power is turned on by the switch on the power supply; it seems system power is now controlled by that switch.
I want a DVI cable to see if one half of the video is dead, but the caps lock didn't seem to work on the keyboard.
Ubuntu is almost installed on the other machine, so I may have a bootable hard drive. I've got it in a state where GPARTED consistently crashes when it scans it, though.

[lavalamp]

Originally Posted by Christenson

I did dismount the CPU cooler; to my dismay, I pulled the CPU out of the ZIF. To remount I pried the CPU off the heatsink, inspected the pins, re-installed it carefully, and re-mounted the heatsink.

Wow, that should definately not have happened. Is the thermal paste sticky at all? If so I'd use some other paste.

The CPU does have a zero insertion force when the lever is up, but when it's down it should be held in place extremely tightly. Are you sure you had the lever all the way down?

Did you not get any beeps even when you took all the RAM out? If not take another look to make sure the speaker is connected correctly.

The DVI socket will output an analog signal as well as a digital one, so if you have a DVI to VGA converter you can see if you get an output from there. I'm not sure where caps lock fits in with a DVI cable.

It also sounds like the BIOS is now set to turn on the computer when power is restored, so that could be why it starts booting up when you flick the power back on.