Can't get system to output video

ProjectBox153 · September 15, 2020

Hi everyone. I have a system that's still new to me. I got it for free a while back when I went to pick up a case that someone was giving away locally. The person giving away the case decided to leave the old hardware in it for the person that got it to mess around with. The specs are as follows (it's the second system in my signature):

Asus P8Z68-V/GEN3 Motherboard (Z68, LGA1155, ATX)
16GB GeIL Enhance Corsa DDR3 (4x4GB)
Intel Core i7-2600 (4C/8T, 3.4GHz, Intel Stock Cooler)
Antec Lanboy Air Yellow
Zotac GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1GB
OEM Nvidia Quadro NVS 295 256MB
240GB ADATA Ultimate SU650 SATA III
Dell 750W PSU (pulled from Dell XPS 630i, known good, replacing the original 850W Thermaltake TR2 RX supply that went bad)

Work has been pretty busy for me so I didn't get a chance to check the machine out immediately, but when I did the power supply was bad. I had been using this system for several days with no issues after replacing the faulty power supply. I've yet to tear the original supply apart to see what went wrong with it, but all the hardware connected to it seemed fine, and like I said worked with a good PSU. The problem with not getting any video output started shortly after installing two optical drives. That's it, no other modifications were done. The system seems to be booting into Windows according to the hard disk activity light on the front of the case, but I can't get any output on the display. The monitor (Dell UltraSharp 19") acts as though it is about to get a signal and turns the backlight on, but it doesn't actually show anything. The monitor works fine on every other device.

I'm just making this post to ask about suggestions for what I should look into first. Any ideas? The system was working completely normally until shortly after I installed and connected 2 optical drives. The drives worked fine in Windows and I shut the machine down to turn the drives to face the right side panel instead of the front, but nothing was changed regarding connections in any way. Any ideas would be appreciated, as I'm just at a bit of a loss.

Radium_Angel · September 15, 2020

30 minutes ago, ProjectBox153 said:

a bit of a loss

Unplug the optical drives, see what happens

ProjectBox153 · September 15, 2020

16 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Unplug the optical drives, see what happens

Sorry, forgot to mention that I've tried that. No difference. Both optical drives work fine.

BAUTURAsMANELE · September 15, 2020

Does it work just fine when the optical drives are removed? If so then perhaps purchase 2 SATA to USB adapters and use them with your optical drives instead of having them plugged into the motherboard with SATA. If the PC doesn’t output video anymore now regardless, then perhaps remove the optical drives and the HDD/SSD and boot into UEFI/BIOS and see if that works with no problem, if there is no Video out still at all the troubleshoot starting from your GPU to your CPU ( you said your PSU is good then dw about it but if you doubt your PSU then check that first ). Hope this helps

ProjectBox153 · September 18, 2020

On 9/15/2020 at 7:28 PM, BAUTURAsMANELE said:

Does it work just fine when the optical drives are removed? If so then perhaps purchase 2 SATA to USB adapters and use them with your optical drives instead of having them plugged into the motherboard with SATA. If the PC doesn’t output video anymore now regardless, then perhaps remove the optical drives and the HDD/SSD and boot into UEFI/BIOS and see if that works with no problem, if there is no Video out still at all the troubleshoot starting from your GPU to your CPU ( you said your PSU is good then dw about it but if you doubt your PSU then check that first ). Hope this helps

With both optical drives removed the system still doesn't work. I can't get into the UEFI setup no matter what. The power supply is fine (old, but still good). I'm going to troubleshoot it some more soon. Thank you.