abit KD7, athlon XP: No boot; just fans turn on. 1

[Phineas42]

It seems a lot of people have this issue, with various hardware...

Here's the setup:
Abit KD7 motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 1.7 (or so) GHz processor
Heat Sink/Fan that came with Board and Processor combo
Crucial 512 MB PC 2700 333 MHz DDR ram (one stick)
Palit Daytona Geforce4 MX440 64bit/64MB AGP video.
300W power supply (with ATX and 4 wire (AGP?) connectors installed)
PC speaker, monitor and a keyboard connected. That's it.
Not installed in a case... insulated on carpet.

Here's the symptoms:
Power off: the amber LED in the corner of the board is lit. I believe this indicates voltage to DRAM.
Power on: all fans (CPU, northbridge) start up. Green power LED on corner of board lights up. No beeps, nothing on the monitor.

Here's the story:
The system worked fine for about a week with 2 ATA HDDs, DVD/CDRW and zip and floppy drives. It was dual booting win 98 and win xp using powerquest BootMagic. It gave a CMOS checksum error at power on, once or twice (after ordinary usage... no BIOS settings change). It was installed in a very small case, with questionable circulation, but operating temperature was at an acceptable 60 degrees.
When the system stopped booting, I was able to briefly revive it by cleaning the CPU/Heat sink connection with 70% isopropyl alcohol and applying some cheap thermal grease from radio shack. At boot, this yielded a 40 degree cpu temperature.
This worked for a few boots: long enough for me to piece-by-piece reassemble the system into the case and attach the drives. Then it would not boot, and removing all of the components again is not working...

Other notes:
The video card has been tested in another machine and works fine if a compatible monitor is attached.
A known good 266 MHz ram stick was swapped in to this system, and did not make a difference.
A known good 400W power supply was swapped in to this system, and did not make a difference.
Some people have suggested checking the on board battery's voltage (like some nominal 3.3V batteries only giving 3V): This battery is nominal 3V, and my voltmeter gives it a 2.99.
The PC speaker never makes a peep, not even if I remove the DRAM.
The automatic overheat protection is working: if I don't mate the cpu and heatsink very well... the system turns off in about 2 to 3 seconds.

My thoughts:
I believe either the motherboard or CPU is faulty... but I have no way to test it since I don't have another motherboard or CPU of these types.
I have trouble believing heat or power is an issue given the troubleshooting of gone through, but then again I have very little experience with athlon systems.


Do you have any thoughts?

 

[paparazi]

You have made a couple of statments in your post that have made me very worried.
1) That you assebled everything on the carpet! unless your carpet is 100% natural fibre it is a static factory big time!! and death to any sensitive electronic components.
2) That you have checked or know that the thermal cut off is working because it cut out 2-3 seconds without proper fitment of heatsink (several times by the way you write)
Sorry, but even with thermal protection thats death as well for an XP processor, even done once the CPU can be irreputably damaged.
My guess is the CPU, you may have got away with the motherboard if you're lucky.
Martin

Replying helps further our knowledge, without comment leaves us wondering.

 

[Phineas42]

Thanks, paparazi for your prompt reply.

You've made me feel a little like a moron... that's not new.

From what you say, I agree... The CPU probably fried...

Still I don't know what went wrong in the first place though... I suppose it could be either the ram or power supply; I just assumed they were fine because new ones did not fix the system.

 

[paparazi]

I'm sorry if i made you feel that way, we all make mistakes and I've made my fair share over the years.
With your original setup, did you run the heatsink without paste at all? I noticed you said it ran at 60C and you are quite right by saying this wouldn't have damaged the CPU but without paste and under load the heat transfer would have been very poor leading to a rapid heating up of the processor. So in effect when you checked the CPU temp at idle, 60C didn't seem too alarming but checked imediately after 10minutes at 100% CPU use may have revealed a much higher temperature (75-85C) high enough to cause permanent damage over time.
Martin

Replying helps further our knowledge, without comment leaves us wondering.