Dead board? Need to confirm before RMA

My mate ordered an A8N32 SLI motherboard from Scan, for his 939 based PC as his old one was having problems with the SATA ports. The new board arrived Monday, and he kept it boxed.

I went round, "simple swap job" i thought, but it wouldn't boot at all. Fans attempt to spin, power supply hisses (two power supplies infact, one of which works perfectly), so I'm thinking dead board. It seems to be trying to start the fans but not succeeding....the light on the motherboard which shows power is running through the board is lit.

It's now sat on my table, out of case, to rule out the board shorting on the case, still refusing to boot. I don't wanna tell him its dead, he RMA's it and it comes back fine. I need to be sure.

I'm going to try his old board tomorrow and see if it fires, but is there anything i have missed?

Thanks.

If the fans are speeding up and then slowing down again, it sounds like a PSU failure (or insufficient power).

PS: You could try disconnecting everything except the bare minimum or try a different PSU.

I've seen a similar problem with some 939 boards and the coolermaster green energy PSU's. Seems some high efficiency PSU's wont boot properly without sufficient drain on the 12v rail.

More here.

The fan doesnt even spin 90 degrees. It just sorta...judders, like it tries to fire but wont. At the same time you hear the hiss from the PSU, like thats trying to fire but won't. 2 PSU's, his Q-Tec ( :angst: ) and my Thermaltake 400w won't play ball. Which to me I think could be a problem with the board.

The Pc is set up with only GPU, CPU, RAM, Motherboard and PSU so bare minimum really.

Wait... you said you used a Q-Tec on this new board?

Q-Tec -> Motherboard Dead

(Edit: Can you try the old motherboard to see if it boots?)