Before I start it's worth noting that I've owned this system for around 3 years now and have simply put up with this problem and it has slowly progressed getting worse and worse. Since day one with this motherboard I've had a lot of really strange issues. From refusing to boot from DVD's (CD's are fine of course), fan's that refuse to slow down and the most annoying of all, problems booting. Whenever I try to boot my computer, unless I wait 5>10minutes the computer will post straight to a F. code and a hard reset is required and more waiting till it eventually decides to boot up. This problem is intermittent and will once or twice has turned on straight after being off (at the plug) all night. I was initially suspect of perhaps an incompatibility of hardware but I've tried swapping everything bar the CPU out to no avail. I then grew concerned of the BIOS which I noticed appeared to be a custom install popped on by the previous owner. This has been updated to the newest version. Another phantom problem that seems to come and go is that when the machine is restarted it will either post the F. code and refuse to boot or it will continue to boot but any output to the monitor is stopped. The problem is sometimes alleviated by flashing the BIOS before booting, but even that has a limited success rate... To make matters even more confusing, I can't find any entry in the manual for the motherboard with the plain F. post code. Only F.0, F.1 etc exist. Lastly, the only other thing worth of note is that the ATX 12v connector is of the 8 pin variety on the motherboard but my PSU only supports 4 pin. I don't imagine this however to be an issue. Hope you can shed some light on the situation. Comp spec Abit P35 Pro XE Intel Pentium D 940 3.2ghz OCZ DDR2 PC2-8000 ReaperX 4GB ATI Radeon X850 XT 256mb Antec Truepower 2.0 550Watt Everything after this point is usually unplugged at this stage so they can be assumed not to be a problem Kingston SSD NOW 64gb Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS Bog standard DVD-RW drive
have you had a look around the motherboard, for leaking or bulging capacitors? the 8pin connector is normally only required when using higher end, more power hungry processors core 2 quad for example, mind you the d940 is a power hungry beast with 130w max tdp, so maybe that is the issue, especially as you have said the problems were from day 1 i don't know if you have the manual for the board, but it is available here abit recommends using 8pin as apposed to 4, due to the limited supply of the 4 pin 240VA
