Sometimes posts... but not often

[D-Cure]

Hi guys,

I came across your site whilst looking for answers to my building nightmare. It's my first go at building a PC (for my mother dearest) from scratch... you seem to know your onions, try and help me solve this badboy :rolleyes:

I've read your guide on the forum.

I have the pc set up in the bare bones configuration i.e. 1 ram stick, cpu, power unit, gfx card and case power.

99% of the time the computer will start up i.e. fans spinning, but no signal to the monitor. 1% of the time it posts and gives me the option to go into bios.
If I turn the computer off and back then on after a successful boot up it goes back to the no signal dectected by the monitor (amber light).

Ive tried all things you have suggested and more:

Trying RAM in different slot/ reseating
Trying the gfx card in different slot/ reseated (tried a different gfx card)
Reseated the CPU
Reset the CMOS
Tried 3 different monitors
The motherboard is seated on the required number of brass screws
Tried two power units.

The only thing I haven't done is try different RAM, could this be the cause? (would have done, but its atfer midnight now and I knackered).
What other reasons could there be?

It's a nightmare because its a random problem, seems like some sort of stability problem.

All parts are new with the exception of the gfx card, but as I said, I've tried with another card I know works.

Thanks for any help/ advice in advance,

D.

The specs of the PC are below:

Antec P160 ATX Tower Case
AMD 3200+ 64bit Athlon (939)
Radeon 9200se (PCI)
Corsair value DDR PC3200 1GB RAM
450W power unit

[Catweazle]

What motherboard?

Checked the monitor cable and connections?

Checked for screws that may have accidentally been lodged under the motherboard or other possible causes of shorting?

[D-Cure]

Sorry, the motherboard is a K8N Neo2 Platinum.
Can't find any objects that shouldn't be under the board. What else could cause shorting?

[D-Cure]

I've finally sorted the problem. It was the graphics card.
I went back to scratch reseated everything again completely etc. Still no joy, I had a gut feeling that the problem was still with the gfx card, despite getting a perfect picture come up once in a while.
Anyway, decided to pull out my old Ti4600 (despite having already tried my 9800 pro)which I partially fried a few years ago (overclocking experiement) and put it in the new puter. Lo and behold, stability. Rebuilt the machine, rebooting after adding each new component.. no problems barring the ti4600 gives a scrambled picture.

Just ordered a Leadtek WinFast GeForce 6800 GT 256MB DDR3.