[SOLVED] New build - Asrock B450M Pro4, PSU turns on when jumpstarted, but not when connected to Motherboard

[Raruna]

I moved to the US from Brazil on a student visa(pursuing a Master's in School Psych), and I brought my hard drive and GPU with me. After several months, I managed to buy the rest of the parts to build my desktop again. Here is the build:

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/NkjhpG

And here is the problem: when I assembled everything this afternoon, nothing would turn on. I clicked the power button, and not even the PSU would turn on. Thinking that I had gotten a dead-on-arrival PSU, I decided to try jumpstarting it, which worked fine. I reconnected everything, installed the speaker I hadn't installed previously, and the problem persisted, the speaker remaining completely silent.

I have now removed the whole build from the case and left the motherboard, the CPU, CPU fan, GPU and PSU all connected. I then both tried connecting the power switch cable from the case to its designated spot on the board, as well as tried to jumpstart the board with a screwdriver between the live and the ground pins. Both yielded the same results as before, literally nothing turning on.

During all of this, I feel I had a lot of difficulty connecting the ATX cable all the way in. It seems to be completely in now, but I am unsure whether it is connecting to the board properly or not. I also noticed that a single CPU pin had become bent during my first attempt, something that I was able to correct with a small sewing needle, and re-inserting with more care.

What could my issue be? Did I just get a dead motherboard?

 

[Darkbreeze]

If you had a bent pin, and started the system with it that way, all bets are off, BUT, the PSU should still come on even if the system is not going to POST or even start up the POST process.

I would pull the 24 pin ATX cable and check the pins in the ATX socket on the motherboard. I suspect you might find bent pins there as well if you had a hard time getting it to seat and had to force it in. Certainly it COULD be a dead motherboard. Do you have memory installed, because you don't mention that.

 

[Raruna]

If you had a bent pin, and started the system with it that way, all bets are off, BUT, the PSU should still come on even if the system is not going to POST or even start up the POST process.

I would pull the 24 pin ATX cable and check the pins in the ATX socket on the motherboard. I suspect you might find bent pins there as well if you had a hard time getting it to seat and had to force it in. Certainly it COULD be a dead motherboard. Do you have memory installed, because you don't mention that.

I did not have the memory installed now, no. I put it on, and tried to start again but nothing happened.

After that I pulled out the ATX cable and none of the pins on the board seemed to be bent. In fact, I had an absurdly old Dell Optiplex 745 power supply lying around and decided to plug its ATX cable in just to compare difficulties, and its cable went in somewhat easier. A very odd thing happened while I was doing that though: when I was pulling out the Corsair VS550 ATX cable, about halfway through pulling it out, all the fans came on! That seemed to only hold whenever I had the cable in a highly specific position. I did not even use the screwdriver jumpstart trick while doing that, they came on just from me pulling the cable. After I pulled it a bit more the CPU fan stopped, but the PSU one would very faintly go "click click click", the blades moving back and forth about one or two millimeters before falling back, and trying to start spinning again.

Edit: Good news! Turns out it was that bent pin after all. It was preventing me from properly closing the CPU lever, so after I fixed it again I was able to place the CPU on the slot and close the lever all the way. Looks like everything else on my installation actually went as intended, so my only issue right now is that I need to get my hands on a Windows 10 boot media, since I don't think my old HDD's installation of Windows 10 is going to work out.

 

[Darkbreeze]

If this is the same motherboard, it should be fine. If you attached your Windows 10 installation to a Microsoft account previously, it should be fine.

How to associate your windows 10 license with a Microsoft account


Reactivating Windows 10 after a hardware change


Windows build 1607 and activation after a hardware change

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