the trouble with that weould be that the spec you would see woulod be that of my current system which i am not having the problem with, The trouble is with my new hardware which i cant even bootup yet

Yea, DOH!!

Sorry, post your board, cpu, memory, vga details etc m8

it's a jetway 830ch mobo with sis730 chipset
AMD Athlon 1.1GHz
the heatsink and fan are good enough for upto a 2 GHz CPU so no problems there
the memory all works cos it's the same as what i have in my currently working PC along
and the speed is okay for the mobo at 133MHz
vga is one of two that i have tried, my old AGP TNT2, or i have also tried using the onboard vga which is detailed here

I have recently rerplaced the cmos battery, but have yet to test it, has anyone else come up with any more thoughts on this problem

This is a brand new motherboard correct ?

Hopefully you received the manual with this board, it might be worth checking the "Reset Cmos Jumper" on the motherboard.
I know when you receive some boards, this jumper is plugged in and the machine doesn't boot up.
If you have the manual look for "Clear Cmos" and just double check to see whether it is enabled or not.

it isn't brand new, i bought it from ebay, risky i know but cheap though, the cmos jumper is at the correct position