Hooking up just MOBO and PSU

[ericfree]

Can someone tell me what is the normal behavior for the following situations?

1. Hooking up just the MOBO and PSU?

2. Hooking up just the MOBO, PSU, and CPU fan?

3. Hooking up just the MOBO, PSU, CPU, CPU fun and RAM?

[Cricket]

Originally Posted by ericfree Can someone tell me what is the normal behavior for the following situations? 1. Hooking up just the MOBO and PSU?

If the power is on to the PSU you'll just see a lit LED on the motherboard indicating it's receiving stand-by power. If you try to power it up by jumping the PWR ON pins without RAM or a video card you should get BIOS beeps indicating a problem (if you have the PC case speaker hooked up unless your motherboard has a built in speaker on it somewhere).

Originally Posted by ericfree 2. Hooking up just the MOBO, PSU, and CPU fan?

When you try to power up the CPU heatsink fan will spin.

Originally Posted by ericfree 3. Hooking up just the MOBO, PSU, CPU, CPU fun and RAM?

When you try to power up the CPU heatsink fan will spin.

Just what are you trying to do anyway? If you don't have all the parts for your computer you should just leave everything alone until you're ready to build. You could damage something while you're messing around with the parts.

Cricket

[minsonngo]

1. The motherboard will simply get power from the PSU.

2. Don't think anything will happen here either besides the motherboard getting power. No CPU installed? You may get a BIOS beep indicating missing CPU or something.

3. It should power up and post if done correctly and no defective parts.



EDIT: Cricket beat me to it.

[ericfree]

> Just what are you trying to do anyway?

One of my parts is fried. Either the PSU, MOBO, CPU, CPU fan, or RAM.
I'm just trying to determine which one is fried.

[minsonngo]

Originally Posted by ericfree > Just what are you trying to do anyway? One of my parts is fried. Either the PSU, MOBO, CPU, CPU fan, or RAM. I'm just trying to determine which one is fried.

Best way would be to test each component seperately in a different machine and use the process of elimination. It could be more than one part that is dead too...

[ericfree]

Yeah, but I need another machine that can take my Pentium 4 (Socket 478), AGP video card, DDR RAM, and MOBO? I don't have that around here.

[minsonngo]

Ahh... I see...

Usually the PSU is the culprit when something is fried. But the only way you can confirm is test them in another machine. Or you can just guess and check.