I have assembled some older components that were lying around - AFAIK, all of them worked but were upgraded. I have an older biostar board, a few small maxtor drives, and an nvidia 5600 AGP card.

On power-up, the fans and drives spin, the caps lock light on the keyboard toggles, but I get no signal whatsoever on the monitor. It's a old LCD, and I only get "no sync" briefly. No BIOS post messages at all. I'm sure the LCD works (and it's plugged in )

I assume its something with the graphics card - if the drives/memory were bad, I would still get a BIOS message, right? If the card is bad, does anyone know how I could troubleshoot it? (I don't have another AGP board to test it in, unfortunately). Is there some way to check the AGP slot or other board components that could be at fault?

Any ideas appreciated - thanks!

You MAY get BIOS messages if you have bad memory...you may not, depending on the motherboard and the BIOS. Do you get any beeps when you power up? Is your system speaker plugged in?

The first thing I'd try would be another video card...even borrow one for a day, just to check what's up. Does your mobo have a built-in video card? If it does, that one may be set to be the 'master', and that's where your video signal is going. May have to take out the AGP card, and come up to BIOS first (or even load the whole system), with onboard video, then add the AGP later, after disabling the onboard video in the BIOS first.

Thanks Tbone -

No, there is no onboard video on the board. I'll see if I can find another AGP card around somewhere, though.

I'll also try taking out some of the memory, and booting with different sticks to see if that's the culprit - that's a good idea. There is a speaker, unplugged - I'll plug that in to see if I get anything.