New Haswell/Z97-E Build Does Not Boot, CPU/GPU Fans Operational

[renardchaton]

So a friend (a buddy that's been building PCs for a while now) and I (a CS major with no experience in building PCs - it's never too late to start) got together today and assembled a gaming PC. I spent quite a bit buying all the parts. Here's the specs on PC part picker:
http://pcpartpicker.com/user/renardchaton/saved/KfLxFT

So when we turned it on, the first thing i noticed was a pretty concerning rattling noise, as well as no signal to the monitor. So we turned everything off, looked inside and noticed that a wire was sticking into the CPU fan. We managed to move it aside and turned it on again, and the rattling noise was gone, but there was still not input getting to the monitor.

The motherboard was displaying a solid green, no flickering or anything. The GPU and CPU fans were spinning so it seemed to be alright - the mobo was definitely getting power.

We tried a few different things - we took out components, moved some around, checked the cables, nothing was working. The light was still a solid green, just no output. So we stepped out for a while, and came back to the setup with fresher minds.
Here, I think we had quite mess up - we were out of sync and didn't turn off the system correctly, or it at least seems like we didn't. The green light on the mobo stood on even after we had completely shut everything off. We ended up switching the PSU on and off and then the mobo light faded out.

A bit after this, we realized the mobo light was not flashing, and not keeping a solid frequency like it was before. Yikes...

This time around, something seemed to tick - I noticed (very embarrassingly) that the CPU was incorrectly installed - the CPU's arrow was out of place in relation to the arrow on the retention plate. So we uninstalled the CPU fan as well as the CPU, and reseated it with the arrows aligned.
After this, we tried again but there was nothing different. The mobo light continued to flicker when powered on. Seems kind of like a trainwreck made worse, but it is my first build, so of course I'm not going to stop here.

Out of everything, I'd really like to know what the flashing light means. The manual doesn't seem to mention it anywhere, just that that certain LED is called a standby light and shows that the mobo is currently getting power. My friend assumed it was meant to signal a short circuit.

We ended up taking out all the components but left the mobo and PSU plugged in, powered it up, same issue, still no signal.

So, has anyone else had a problem like this? Does anyone have suggestions? I may take it to Micro Center to get it checked out tomorrow.

 

[Ryaninator 54]

Your board and/or CPU is fried. Test with old CPU. If it works buy new CPU. If it doesn't work, get a new board. If it still doesn't work, get a new cpu.

 

[renardchaton]

Your board and/or CPU is fried. Test with old CPU. If it works buy new CPU. If it doesn't work, get a new board. If it still doesn't work, get a new cpu.

I thought I replied to this in the morning, but the mobile website appears to be no good. Unfortunately I don't know what micro center would think about "borrowing" and returning an old CPU... in the end I figured it would be cheaper to just get a diagnostics test. Micro Center has a pretty affordable service, so I gave them the details, and should be getting results tomorrow. Also, after doing more searching online, it seems that it's likely that the PSU is just unreliable and caused the problem, but we should know for sure soon. If that's the case, I may stick around for PSU recommendations.

 

[renardchaton]

Diagnostic came back a while ago, they told me the mobo was bad but the PSU, CPU and socket were fine. Replaced mobo with the same chipset, slightly different model (no USB 3.1). Still no POST. We tried going through HDMI and VGA this time. Maybe I will go try DVI. We talked to an ASUS rep and the RAM appears to be incompatible, because it is not on the QVL. So I may drop by Micro Center and and ask the BYOPC people about it, perhaps test some compatible RAM if they allow me to.

We also noticed the USB headers were not transferring power to the old wired keyboard we had plugged in.

 

[renardchaton]

Finally found the issue, the BIOS was attempting to boot through the GPU as the output device. Took out the GPU, BIOS finally came up and I eventually set the primary graphics to CPU - only issue is the NVIDIA drivers - they make windows throw a BSOD every time they install. A BSOD will show up twice before windows repairs itself by removing the NVIDIA drivers. Any help would be appreciated.