re: PC Discussion - Gaming, Performance and Enthusiasts

Yea, temperatures were never a major issue once I installed the water cooler.They were a bit of trouble before the water cooler but nothing crazy. I was doing some research online and people were talking about a battery or something and pulling it out and re-seating it. Where is that battery?

When I had to replace my CMOS battery on my old build years ago, the computer would shut off 5 seconds after power up.

I couldn't get to the BIOS unless I replaced it.

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now I see nothing when I turn my computer on. It's just a black screen and none of my peripherals are recognized. Keyboard won't turn on, nor will my mouse or monitors.

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Is the computer actually powering on? Do you at least see the usual lights and fans, even if it never sends a signal to the monitor? I forget what motherboard you have, or whether your case came with an internal speaker (to produce POST codes via a series of beeps that are helpful in indicating which piece of hardware failed to initialize).

A lot of modern motherboards use an LED read-out on the board itself indicating each step in the POST process. The first thing that happens is CPU initialization, which then pulls instructions from the motherboard's BIOS chip. BIOS chip tells the CPU to check for the rest of your hardware in sequence, and if it can't find something crucial (like RAM or video), it'll halt the process and throw you an error code either via beeps (if you have an internal speaker) or a code on a small LED readout on the board... or both. That can help with diagnostics, but it doesn't exactly tell you why something isn't recognized. If a code tells you it can't see your RAM, it doesn't necessarily mean your RAM is bad. Your DIMM slots could be bad, or the memory controller could be bad (far less likely).

Before all that though, the PSU has to initialize and provide correct and reliable power. The CPU won't do anything until that happens. So fans can spin and lights can blink, but you'll see nothing. If the PSU isn't bad, but if the CPU is bad, your computer is essentially a vegetable (it may not even power on). If the CPU is fine but the bios chip is dead or corrupted, the CPU is flying blind and so nothing happens (i.e., hardware is not initialized at all and again you see nothing). If the bios chip is fine but your CMOS battery is dead, NORMALLY you'd still see something on your monitor anyway, but it would simply put your bios settings back to default and make you check them (and it'll do this at every boot). Beyond that, you're just further running down the list of all the potential points of failure in the motherboard... and your other essential components, which are all linked to and dependent on the motherboard's many potential points of failure.

And when we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eat the grass. And so we are all connected in the great Circle of Life.

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Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($134.99 @ Amazon)

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I need to get a 2nd SSd with the prices these days.

Overall, no it does not matter unless you're gaming on integrated graphics (since it shares system memory). Even in video/photo editing, you'd have to be doing some serious side-by-side comparisons to be able to measure how many extra milliseconds you shave off a few minutes of work. Benchmark tests are really the only reliable way of comparing performance between two kits that close in speed.

But don't forget to account for latency ratings when comparing RAM specs. DDR4-2133 CL13 is almost as fast as a cheap DDR4-2800 CL17 kit. There are DDR4-3200 CL14 kits that are cheaper and faster than DDR4-3600 CL16. If I were going to get a 16GB DDR4 kit and did not want the slowest (just for psychological reasons), I'd probably opt for a DDR4-3000 CL15 kit at the moment since the price isn't unreasonable. Around $70 for a 16GB. For the next very marginal step up in speed, it's $30, and a larger step down would save only about $12. But if RAM speed really did matter, I'd cling to my DDR3-2133 CL9 kit for as long as I can, since it is faster than every DDR4 kit, except the DDR4-2400 CL10 Dominator Platinum I guess.

Pretty common for first-time builders. Check all connections, reseat everything, make sure monitor is actually plugged in, cable connected to video card and not motherboard port, etc.

Post pics of connections if that fails.

EDIT: Seriously, check monitor connections. If it's cycling through error codes, those aren't error codes at all but just indicators of what's happening in the POST process.

Did you make sure your RAM modules are in the correct slots?

The MSI z170a sli plus board that I just got required slot 2 seated first with slot 4 in dual channel mode according to the manual.

Yeah, it appears to be POSTing, and something is preventing your monitor from receiving a signal.

I don't see a video card, so I'm assuming you're using onboard. HDMI, DVI, or Displayport?

Post more pics.

Put GPU back in, with all cables connected as appropriate, and take pics of all connections.