MSI K8N Neo 4F Problems

[Tonka777]

Hi guys,

These forums come highly recommended from a few friends so i'm hoping someone will be able to help me out here!

I have a kind of old system, based around a skt 939 Opteron dual core chip. I have had some issues in the past where the graphics card would not boot with the rest of the system, the fan would just spin up and no display was forthcoming, a press of the reset button or power button usually resulted in a reboot with the display working as expected. I suspected that this was caused by the overclock, and decided i could live with it for the time being.

A couple of days ago the system done a similar thing, no signal on the monitor and the fan spinning as fast as it could, however no amount of rebooting, resetting the CMOS, removing and swapping of ram, or reseating of the graphics card gave any success, the system refused to boot and just sat there with no signal on the monitor.

I initially thought it was a graphics card issue, so took it to a local shop for a quick test. They had an output on the first attempt of trying it in another system, the graphics card must be ok then!

I went home and and swapped out the CPU with an old single core Athlon 64, i had a hard time trying to get the HSF to release from the core, as if the AS5 had turned to glue, a final tug resulted in the HSF coming away from the board with the CPU stuck to it, this was without me lifting the lever next to the socket! The CPU looks ok, i'm hoping the pins just sprung out of their holes and no further damage was done to the chip or the board......

After finally getting the other CPU in the board i plugged everything back in to find that the system still wouldn't boot, now it just switches off a couple of seconds after turning it on.

I had considered and am now hoping that that at least the initial graphics problem was caused by a corrupt BIOS. I dont have a D Bracket for the board, hopefully a local shop will find one for me over the weekend. That may help me further.

In the mean time can anyone advise if a corrupt BIOS could have caused the first problem, and, if i am likely to have wrecked the board when the chip came out without the lever being lifted?!

Not had a very constructive few days with the system, and now its looking i have to find the cash to make the lga 775 jump!

Any help would be much appreciated here! Thanks in advance.

[McstylisT]

Hi , Welcome to the forum.


Sorry to hear your system troubles.


I can not give you a complete answer but maybe a few foundations on what others with more insight on this could build on maybe.

Firstly , With the CPU coming out on the HSF. Please do not worry to much. On all of my old 939 , AM2 , AM2+ systems this happened more or less every time. I was worried like yourself but in my case in never caused a problem. As long as the pins are straight and you can notice the socket move when you release the clip up and down the it " should " be ok.


At first your problems sound like a few things. First things i thought of was PSU and motherboard/bios.
Its hard to determine which is causing problems at this stage but this is where i would start my initial enquires.

Did you ever have any odd bios messages when the system was running over the last few months. ??

Any sudden power downs , or un expected rebooting ? ?


Hopefully some of the other very knowledgeable members will be able to chip in here soon too.

speak to you soon,

Regards


McT

[Tonka777]

Thanks for the reply!

I was having some random restart problems about 9 months ago, which i put down to a weak PSU so i replaced the old Enermax one with the Modstream.

As for odd BIOS messages, i have noticed for some time that the; updating DMI pool............Success!
message was showing on every boot, even when i hadn't altered any settings in BIOS. That is assuming that you are only meant to see this message when you alter something? I just attributed this to the overclock, maybe i should have looked into it sooner!

Any further info is much appreciated!