Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Troubleshooting: PC turns on but nothing is displayed

Follow these steps to fix and diagnose a PC that starts, but fails to display anything on screen

NOTE: For each step that requires working inside your computer, you should turn your power supply off until you're finished working, then turn it back on when you go to test.

  1. If your computer power supply has a 115/230v switch on the back ensure that the voltage is set to the appropriate voltage for your country
  2. Ensure that if you are using a video card that your monitor is plugged into your video card, and not the motherboard.
  3. Open your computer if it wasn't already and check over the 24 pin ATX cable and 8 pin ATX12v (may be a 4 pin on some motherboards) and ensure both are plugged in firmly.
  4. Ensure that your video card is plugged in. Many video cards require power from a 6 pin PCIe power connector.
  5. Ensure that the RAM is fully seated. If you have more than one module attempt to boot with the first removed, then try again with the first installed and all others removed. If booting works with a specific stick removed that stick can be assumed to be the issue.
  6. Ensure that the standoffs are correctly installed and there are no extra standoffs under the motherboard that do not correlate with screw holes on the motherboard.
  7. Unplug the hard drive and disk drives and if your PC has integrated video remove the video card as well. attempt to boot again, if boot up is successful reconnect parts one at a time to determine the problem part. If the problem part is the video card the issue might be power supply related or video card related.


If you were unable to diagnose the possibilities are.
  • motherboard
  • RAM (unlikely if you had 2 sticks and could test individually)
  • CPU (fairly unlikely, these don't show up dead often)
  • Video card (if you had integrated graphics this can be ignored)
  • PSU (this is very unlikely, especially if you had integrated graphics)

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