Saturday, November 29, 2014

And...shoot me

Finished the build. Looks great. I figured the chances of booting up were about 20%.

I was too optimistic.

It's a weird problem, though, and weird problems are why I should never build my own systems, because you take a defined work period and expand it infinitely.

Here's what happening. I connected the power cord to the power supply and turned it on. The motherboard lights came on (good sign). The logo on the graphics card lit up (good sign). The graphics card fans started spinning (good sign). I'm feeling good!

No display on the monitor, though (bad sign).

I tried a different connection type and rebooted. Still nothing.

After a few minutes, I realized that the CPU fan wasn't spinning (very bad sign). It started to spin when I turned the system on, then shut off. Plus, when I turn the system off, it rotates, then stops.

The heatsink is the Noctua NH-D15, and Noctua fans are included with it. Also included with the fan is a low noise adapter (LNA) extension cable, which I used initially. I tried it without the LNA cable. No difference. Tried the second, optional fan that came with the heatsink (connecting it to the CPU fan header on the motherboard to see if the first fan was bad). No difference.

The Noctua fans have four-pin connectors, and the connection on the motherboard is also four pins.

So I'm dead in the water (I guess that means no one has to shoot me, technically). It's a classic Catch-22--I can adjust fan settings and presumably fix this if I can get into the BIOS, but unless it's fixed, I can't get into the BIOS.

Too bad, really. It's a great looking system.

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