Hi All,
Have a very strange issue and was wondering if I could get some advice. I'm really at a loss. But there's a bit of a story.
About a year ago I made a HTPC which could play games. It had a;
Gigabyte GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3 Mobo
i5 CPU
8GB CORSAIR RAM
Radeon GFX Card
Anyway, since getting the Xbox One I barely use the gaming PC anymore and wanted to move it to my bedroom to use as a desktop PC. So I bought a cheap case to swap it out with and boy do I regret doing that now.
So my case arrives, I've got a good history with swapping out motherboards with my work etc, swapped everything out, all the standoffs were in the correct places, all the screws were screwed etc. Moved all the components from the old case to the new case. Turned on the PC, everything looked like it was booting normally, went to put the side of the case on to close it all up properly and as I was doing this the screen goes black and the PC restarts. It gets to the BIOS splash screen and continuously keeps rebooting itself. At the BIOS splash screen I cannot go into any menus or boot order or recovery mode... it's all completely unresponsive. Taking the side off the PC again, the fans all spin up for about 30 seconds, and then they stop and the PC restarts. Constant boot loop. I tried resetting the CMOS, taking sticks of RAM out, trying them in different slots, trying singular RAM, removing the GFX card and using on board VGA... nothing changes, Same result. BIOS screen, reboot, BIOS screen, reboot. I even tried finiding another case with a speaker to listen out for some speaker error codes but there's nothing. No beeps, no error codes.
So at this stage I think the only thing that could have happened is that somehow when putting the side of the case back on I've shorted something on the mobo. So I went out and purchased a similar mobo. Installed everything (apart from GFX card) into the case. Only this time the same thing happens but with no BIOS logo. The fans all start up, on for about 15-30seconds, the computer shuts down and the whole thing reboots. Extremely confused I found a different power supply, connected that up and the exact same result.
So now I'm really at a loss. I've swapped the mobo and power supply.
Is it likely that in this scenario either both sticks of RAM or the CPU have broken? That seems incredibly unlikely to me, but i'm really struggling to think of what else this could be?
Unfortunately I can't get my hands on any DDR3 RAM so i've had to purchase some of Ebay for £10. Which wont be here til Thursday.
Any help with this would be mostly appreciated, I really feel like i'm just throwing money at something that can't be fixed. So frustrating.
Thanks for reading,
Sam
Here's a video of the boot loop - is this motherboard related?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mDBz-CH-kA
