Recently I took some advice from the folks in the simple questions forum in regard to an upgrade. My previous build was:
AMD Phenom II X4 965
MB: GA-770T-USB3
RAM: DDR3 12 GB
GPU: NVIDIA GTX 670
I found that I was not getting the fps I wanted in long sc2 matches, when there were lots of units on screen, and it was recommended that I upgrade my CPU, which would likely also require a motherboard upgrade.
So in the end I chose to get the ASUS Z97-A and an Intel Core i5 4690.
In my ignorance I figured it would be as simple as just moving the parts off my old motherboard and onto the new, so that is what I did. After assembling everything correctly (or so I suspected....that much is not clear currently) I tried to boot up the computer. It delivered me to the "EZ update" BIOS management screen. I wasn't totally sure if I needed to do anything there, and after reading the booklet which came with the MB it didn't suggest I absolutely needed to update my BIOS or anything, so I told the computer to boot up. After showing the microsoft logo and the little moving balls (windows 7) for roughly 2 seconds, a blue screen appeared with some sort of error message, but one that flashed too quickly to read. Then it tried to boot up again. This time I tried running a repair with boot up, but that simply never ended. It just continued to repair until I turned off the computer.
Currently, the following circumstances reliably repeat during every boot up:
As soon as I press the power button, the fans start spinning and it starts to power up for about 2 seconds, and then a red light near the CPU turns on, and the entire system turns off. Then the system boots up again, and often manages to deliver me again to the BIOS menu. During this time various red lights turn on around the computer. Sometimes it will try and fail to boot up two times in a row, and sometimes it is only once.
I was not sure what sort of problem this was, so I tried a variety of things.
I tried to unplug the EATX12V plug, the one which supposedly corresponds to the CPU. This is an 8 pin hole which I use two 4 holed plugs to plug up to. When those plugs are removed, but the 24 pin slot is still plugged in with the PSU, the motherboard lights up in what seems (to me) to be a more healthy fashion. There are no red lights anywhere. But nothing shows up on the monitor because the CPU is not powered on. The instant I try plugging those cords back in, the same boot up pattern returns.
I also tried moving my GPU to a different slot, moving the RAM around, starting with no RAM, pluging the SATA cords into different ports, plugging in different combinations of cords coming from the PSU (either the same pattern is produced or the computer fails to turn on).
Is there some big thing I am missing? Is there some reason why using a brand new motherboard with used components would cause problems? If I could find a way to read the error message on the blue screen, I would.
I appreciate the help!