Stripped down build:
ASUS A8N-E Mobo
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Processor
Maxtor 40 ATA/133 HD with WinXP Home freshly installed on an NTFS partition (also tried a fresh XP Pro install).
2x 1GB Kingston PC3200 184-Pin (also tested with an old systems working 512 stick)
ATI Radeon X700 Pro 256MB PCI-E
Okay, the title is possibly incorrect, but I wouldn't know. My new, and first ever, build wont display anything on the monitors. Nada, zip zilch. It doesn't even "wake up" the LCDs that are plugged in. I tried an old VGA monitor and it has the same (no) effect. The LCDs only detect that they are plugged into "something" and therefor do not display the "No signal detected" message, but do not come out of standby mode when the system supposedly boots.
All peripherials (mouse, keyboard, HD, floppy, CD, fans, leds, etc) get power and flash up and seem to act as on might expect when a system boots. The CD drive indicator flashes and I can hear the (WinXP Boot) CD being read a few seconds after the power is switched on. I Haven't had any luck using a boot floppy on this system even trying two separate floppy drives and 3 different types of boot disk, which all work on another system.
All symptoms point to the Gfx Card, though it could still be something else. The mobo has no onboard so I can't test that way. I have no old regular PCI Gfx Cards to test and no other system available with PCI-Express with which to test the new card. I've never used ATI or PCI-E before so I may be missing something obvious or possibly entirely unrelated.
I'm hoping someone here has some ideas, farfetched or not that I could try. Otherwise I'll have to take the card (or possibly the whole system) in to get tested, and I don't have time to do that until the weekend. I really really don't want to wait that long.