Godd evening fellow forum members.. hahaha.. thanks for reading..if i have not given concise enough information let me know ill try give u more..

now i have been getting a computer built from scratch.. for 7 WEEKS! nothing but troubles.

amd 5200+
1 gig of 4200 ddr2 ram
asrock full atx pcie board with via chipset, no onboard graphics 1ghz fsb
160 gig sata2 7200 seagate HDD
500 true power (cant remember brand) power supply.
x-fi extreme gamer sound card
temporary radeon card, not sure what it is (getting 1950xt if the computer ever works)
windows XP

now here is the problem, it wont boot, sometimes it will but will run unstable and other time, more often then not it wont boot. it will goto start up and then stop and only the fans will continue to spin untill you turn it off at the powersupply. and if u leave it to sit for 30 seconds and goto start it, then it will boot and you will get a post beep, it will maybe run for a while then crash.. so to me it seems it is not going through post ...............................i took it off that technician because he was out of ideas and gave it to another company in town, they were soo intriuged they said they were going to stop what they were doing just to have a play and try figure it out... bit of a doozy.... anyways if u have any ideas lemme know...
all the parts have been swapped again with new ones again, so everything is new.. so now my technician has a full computers worth of parts sitting at his work doing nothing hahaha.

Well...that is a doozy and a half...

So you've literarly swapped everything in the computer and still not booting?

This kind of issue is caused by 1 of 4 things...i've never found this untrue.

1) Motherboard
2) Power supply
3) Video card
4) Memory


It could be an incompatibilty between brands? But i doubt that as everythings fairly nice with each other these days.

thanks... yes, everything has been interchanged. and because it still didnt work, swapped for new stuff again just incase it was a manufacture fault.. still nothing.. we thoiught the case was earthing out so we changed it, it wasnt we thought the psu was running out of power, so we change it to a bigger one, we thought the ram was the problem, we swapped it, we thought the motherboard was the problem, we swapped it, we thought the gpu was the problem so we swapped the motherboard to fit a pcie card instead of agp. still, the same bloody thing.. oh we swapped the motherboard to a different manufacturer too and swapped processors too i got to upograde it higher again from a 4400 to a 5200. also we have gone through the HCL and its all meant to work in harmony

wow....
that's.....
painful...

you're not in perth are you? I'd like to sit infront of this one to fix it...or attempt to...

Just had a thought...your 1gb of memory...is it 1 stick of 1gb, or 2 sticks of 512mb?

single stick of 1gig... dont tell me...**** thats the only thing we didnt try... no not perth unfortunantly...

hehe

Always go for paired ram...never single slots.

A custom built gaming rig will almost always require 2 sticks - matched.