Maximus IV Extreme-Z powers off immediately after starting ... please help

[thebski]

Hey guys,

I had 3-way GTX 670's but decided I didn't like the PCI-E 2.0 bottleneck so I traded one of my cards for a 3930K. Last night. I pulled the 3 cards on water out, installed the air cooler on the one I was trading and tested it to make sure all was well. Everything went great and I was playing BF3 online without a problem.

Today I went to reinstall the other two cards in my system and fill the loop up. Installed everything, leak checked it, everything looked fine so I hit the power button. It started up long enough to light up all the red fan lights and spin up the fans and then immediately powered off. It will not stay on for more than 1 ... 2 seconds at most.

Long story short, things I have tried that have yielded the exact same result:

-- Install old GTX 570
-- Remove CPU block and CPU, clean CPU, reapply thermal paste and remount CPU and block
-- Unplug hard drive
-- Take a spare PSU that is also Seasonic, remove the 24-pin and 8-pin plugs out of my X-1250 and plug them into the spare X-750 that for sure works. Also plugged water pump directly into mobo. Removed graphics card but left sata devices plugged in but unpowered. Only 3 things were plugged in power wise: 24-pin, 8-pin, and pump direct to mobo. Same result. Powers off immediately.

I know my pump works fine because I used the X-750 in the second machine to power my pump for filling the loop and leak testing not minutes before I tried it in my machine.

That means that either the mobo took a dump on me or my CPU somehow went bad. What do you guys think? I'm sure it has to be the motherboard. Those are the only two possible parts left that it could be. I just have no idea why it would happen right when I make a hardware switch

Should I contact Asus tech support?

I hope it is the motherboard as I have the 3930K on the way and a shiny new Rampage IV Formula to go with it. I was going to RMA the Maximus IV Extreme anyways because the USB devices refuse to stay connected so hopefully it is again the board causing this problem.

[bikeman@ASUS]

You have to try to clear CMOS?

[Zka17]

It seems to me that you may have some short issues... it's shutting down because of some safety mechanism...

Maybe, while you were working with the water, some drops of it got into a wrong place... try to double check that... - dry your system with a hairdryer...

[thebski]

A short is what its acted like to me, but with as many towels and everything as I use it's highly unlikely that water got anywhere it shouldn't.
To be sure i will dry everything. I did try clearing the cmos, but i have not tried flipping the bios switch to the second bios. Would that help?

[Zka17]

You could try switching the BIOS too... just be sure that you don't have a short somewhere...

[thebski]

I am going to remove the motherboard and place onto a piece of cardboard. I am going to spend a decent amount of time hair drying the motherboard to be sure that no drop of water is somehow where it is not suppose to be. I'm going to put in a 2500K I have in another machine at the moment, 1 stick of memory, a Seasonic X-750 I know works and see if the board will power on and stay on. No video cards or extra devices of any kind. Mobo, 1 stick of memory, working 2500K and working PSU is all that will be involved.

I will report back. If it still won't power on then my board is bad, correct? I don't see how it could be anything else.

[lypse]

I'm sorry if I missed it.

But have you tried to remove the two new gpu cards?

[lepord]

Im having the exact same problem with my setup, just got it all yesterday and spent about 5 hrs going through and making sure everything was hooked up correctly and it just does a loop of starting up and shutting down about every 5 seconds.

[Zka17]

Hey, lepord - welcome to the ROG forum!

Your issue could be quite different then thebski's... his rig was working before...

In my humble opinion, it would be better for you to start a new thread... with all the detail of your built... - please, don't get me wrong, it will be more helpful to you without the possibility to derail this thread...