PC Tech Ok PC gurus, I need your help...

[XxEvil AshxX]

My wife has an Asus Cyberpower PC that she uses for work. Since she also has a Mac laptop she uses, I had her set up on a kvm switch. She was complaining about clutter and asked to move the PC under the desk, which I helped her do. I tested everything and everything worked fine.

 

Fast-forward 2 days and she has nothing outputting from her PC. I brought it upstairs, hooked it directly to a good monitor, and am getting nothing. Tried HDMI and the DV port. Nothing. I don't even get a boot up or bios screen. Monitor stays in standby.

 

I re-seated the ram, checked cables, removed battery backup, etc. Everything seems to be good. I even removed the GPU to see if I could get a signal from the on-board output. Nothing.

 

I get no sounds, and since it's an SSD I can't even hear if the hard drive is being accessed. Just the fans running and the LED's changing colors. 

 

Clicking mouse and tapping keyboard doesn't seem to do anything.

 

Overheating is a possibility, but she wasn't using the PC at all this week (she tells me it was off, but eeeehhh), even still under the desk is pretty well ventilated and the PC is still fairly new and dust-free.

 

I was a PC tech once upon a time but it's been a while. My instincts are telling me the motherboard is fried but a Google search tells me this isn't exactly uncommon with these pcs. I'm really hoping I don't have to deal with Asus tech support.

 

The thing that's bugging me the most is that I don't even get a BIOS screen.

 

Does anyone have any ideas?

[Keyser_Soze]

Is the power supply switch turned on?

[XxEvil AshxX]

4 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Is the power supply switch turned on?

 

Oops. I guess with all my flustered rambling I left out a key detail. I get lights and fans when turning on the PC but no video output. Not even a logo screen or BIOS. 

[Nokra]

 

That's a weird one. A couple ideas: 

 

Did the input source selector on the monitor get switched and auto switching is disabled? E.g. your computer is hooked up to HDMI but the monitor is looking for Displayport.

 

Can you get a signal on the same monitor with a different device? 

 

You said you checked the cables; how did you check them?

 

Does the system respond to a ping on the network? 

[Bacon]

6 hours ago, Nokra said:

You said you checked the cables; how did you check them?

When I built my first PC, and once had a similar issue to the OP although I can remember exactly what the issue was. I had realized that certain lights on my PC weren't lit. They were basically cosmetic, but I wanted them on. I took it to a friend's house, we got the lights on, and suddenly, well I don't remember if the PC wasn't turning on or if there was just no display, but it just wasn't working. We undid "everything". The only thing we didn't do was disassemble the whole thing and rebuild it.

 

I ended up having to take it to a local place that fixes computers, and all they claimed to do was replace a SATA cable. I don't even understand how that was the issue to this day, but they handed me the old cable that they replaced. I'm not even sure what that SATA cable was hooked up to and they didn't say.

[XxEvil AshxX]

7 hours ago, Nokra said:

 

That's a weird one. A couple ideas: 

 

Did the input source selector on the monitor get switched and auto switching is disabled? E.g. your computer is hooked up to HDMI but the monitor is looking for Displayport.

 

Auto-switching is enabled, plus I manually changed inputs just to make sure.

 

7 hours ago, Nokra said:

 

Can you get a signal on the same monitor with a different device? 

 

Yes. It's the monitor in my game room that I use daily.

 

7 hours ago, Nokra said:

 

You said you checked the cables; how did you check them?

 

I made sure everything was seated nice and snug. The ONLY thing I can think of is that one cable came out completely and I can't tell because of the mess of wires shoved up under that compartment that contains the hdd and the PSU.

 

7 hours ago, Nokra said:

 

Does the system respond to a ping on the network? 

 

I haven't tried seeing if it shows up on the network. I will plug it into the LAN this evening and see if it appears.

 

[Spork3245]

Sounds like dead cpu or motherboard. You could also try pulling one of the ram sticks (assuming there’s 2), if it doesn’t work try the other one to eliminate the possibility of it being bad ram (or take both out and put ram you know that’s working in).

 

What socket type is the motherboard?

[Nokra]

I'm guessing your motherboard doesn't have a POST code reader screen (i.e. a "7-segment display"), right? Sometimes this can give a clue as to where it's hanging but not all motherboards have them and it depends where the system is hanging whether or not it will provide any useful info.

 

I agree with Spork that it's starting to sound like a bad CPU, motherboard, or memory. As a first step there, you could also try just reseating the memory and CPU. 

 

Do you have another system that's compatible with any of these components (e.g. GPU, memory, CPU, etc.)? If so, I'd recommend taking them out of the problem system and trying them one by one in a known-good system to see if they work there.  

 

Or, try the reverse and replace individual components in the problem system with known-good components to see if the system suddenly works.  You're basically just trying to isolate variables here.