Okay, so the 7.5 is only an estimate - it's about 7, maybe 8.

I built this thing from scratch yesterday, and I noticed that it would turn itself OFF after less than a second. After confirming that a power failure was not the case (both by trying to boot with only the bare essentials, and by checking with a multimeter), I attached the heatsink more firmly to the processor. Now it doesn't turn itself off (an overheat shutoff after 1 second? weird) - but it reboots constantly. The ide led shows constant activity, cdrom and dvd drives lights blink constantly. The hdd spins up and then does nothing. I don't know if the bios is POSTing - I don't hear any beeps, and I don't yet have a graphics card installed.

The board is an ASUS A7S333 with an Athlon XP 1900+, 1x256 DDR SDRAM (2100). The PSU is 400W, supplies sufficient voltage and amperage (I've checked by hand - they're on target). I have a 61.4GB IBM HDD set as primary master (not important if it's not POSTing, though), and a CD-RW as secondary master, DVD-ROM as secondary slave. I have a NIC running on a PCI interface - and that's it. The bios is already the latest version ASUS has released (1003).

Any idea what could be causing this?

Alex Tribble

I have the biggest idea that it would be the heatsink/fan, that the cpu is not getting enough cooling...(only a guess). ASUS boards are equipped with a "shutdown overheat" that means that it shuts down when the board thinks that the temp of the CPU is too high. what kind of heatsink/fan is on it currently? cause cooling is a VERY essential part of the computer. maybe if you add a couple of case fans it should make it not as bad....
:just a thought:

That's exactly it, though - it's a "shutdown overheat." I already had that problem and fixed it. Now the CPU doesn't overheat (I doubt it ever did, anyway - it shut off after about 12 secs, tops), a warm reboot is taking place every few seconds. Again, I'm not sure of anything - I have no way of telling if there is any output to the screen, as I have no graphics card yet.

And one more thing - NOTHING has run long enough to overheat yet.

Some useful knowledge:

ASUS boards don't usually boot if you don't have a video card installed.

Did you plug in your speakers?

The new ASUS boards have onboard POST speech. Plug in your speakers and the board will talk. It'll probably say...

"Video card not detected"

Just a thought. Do you have any different RAM that you could try. This sounds like something similar as to what bad (incompatible) RAM will do.

I'm betting the CPU is DOA:

I removed the CPU and turned on the computer, and experienced EXACTLY the same symptoms - fans power up (even the CPU fan), hard disks spin up, floppy light stays on, cd lights blink intermittently, etc.

So I'm going to try and replace the processor. But I can try the speakers, I guess - I think that's an optional feature, though.

Alex

Had similar prob with asus board...turned out fan was plugged in wrong spot for cmos to detect rpm. Therefore thinking fan was not operating and
rebooting.