I bought an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard new out of the box, and a Athlon XP CPU from eBay also new. The problem I am having is that it will not POST. I have taken all PCI cards out and unhooked all CDROMS and Hard drives and still get not peep codes. How can I tell if it is the Processor or Motherboard that is bad. Note: all PCI cards and hard drives work with my old motherboard. Steve Thanks, Steve

Rule # 1...always benchtest a board before installing it in the case. It saves you from going thru the hassle of installing it, only to find out it doesn't work. Now you don't know if it's the board, CPU, power supply, or something shorting out on the case. Are you sure your PSU is good?

A common mistake is to install a motherboard mounting stud where there is no hole in the motherboard. Sorry, I do not check for private messages

If you did not make sure the ram you are using is compatible with your mboard, a common cause of no post is you are trying to use ram that is incomptible with your mboard - there may be nothing wrong with your mboard, cpu, and power supply. A bench test will fail if you have the wrong ram. You can go to the web site of any major memory module manufacturer or distributor and look up which modules work in your mboard for sure. Also see this, particularly response 12: http://www.computing.net/hardware/wwwboard/forum/41305.html

i had a ASUS A7V8X which is not quite the same as yours. This had 'speaking' error codes instead of beeps. It had a ram problem one day and would not boot. if i turned speakers on and turned volume right up there was a voice saying: System falied memory test. Does yours have this same speaking function built in - plug speakers in and turn volume right up and see if it does. It could do all sorts of messages like: No cpu installed System failed CPU test System failed VGA test Could provide the answer. Let us know

The power supply was new and the ram was tested and is good. The ram I used was correct. Yes mine does have the voice for for error codes. But nothing came over the speaker I had pluged into the motherboard. Thanks, Steve

you mention the speaker plugged into the motherboard. On mine it had to be the 'proper' speakers plugged into the normal green speaker socket on the back of the computer in order to hear the 'system failed memory test' etc messages. I know that sounds odd as you'd think those speakers would only work if booted into windows and loaded sound drivers , but I can assure you that's how this function worked on mine.