*RESOLVED* PC wont boot - *Now looking for upgrade/replacement suggestions

[DesiPower]

I press the power button, it starts, the fans come on, the HDD light blinks for few seconds, then nothing. Nothing on monitor either, I have video card, but connected on on-board, and switched with working video card, but still nothing. Since I cant even see the bios, I am thinking its the CPU? or the mobo?

I was running 3Dmark last night, left it running over night, came back in the morning, the computer was still running but nothing would show on the Monitor, rebooted and that's when I saw the above behavior.

I read that 3Dmark can burn you CPU some CPU0 error or something... is it true?

I am planning to unplug everything and start deep trouble shooting, but I am pretty sure either mobo or cpu is hosed. I do have a couple of other desktops with same socket, I will switch the CPU and see what happens, but that's the last resort.

 

[4ghz]

If you have more then one stick of ram try them individually. If it still doesn't work then its most likely the motherboard.

 

[DesiPower]

Yeah, its the mobo. I put the RAM and CPU on the other PC and everything worked fine there. Has to be the mobo.
Now while looking for new mobo, I realized that its probably better to get both the CPU and mobo. Here's what I am thinking

Mobo -
ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Killer, $90 AR. Is this a good mobo? How prudent would it be to spend an extra 30 - 40 bucks and get ASUS?

CPU -
Intel Core i5-4590, $200. Seems to at the sweet spot price/performance wise

Any suggestions?

 

[mfenn]

$90 AR is a really good price for the Z97 Killer. Normally I would say to go for an H97 board if you're not overclocking, but the H97 boards with comparable featuresets to the Z97 Killer cost about the same.

 

[DesiPower]

The old computer started working, no more issues. After it broke, I took everything off the mobo, even the battery and set it aside. Couple of days later, I just put the RAM and CPU and started it and it looked fine, put everything back together and still running fine, even ran some benchmark tools for about 15 minutes and still everything was running fine. has been about 3 days now, even left it running overnight and all is good. I cleaned the cpu and heatsink and applied fresh paste and the CPU at idle is running at around 28 degrees, a few degrees cooler than before, maybe its the weather

Meanwhile Newegg jacked up the price of the Z97 mobo I mentioned above by $20, so that was a bummer, I am holding off on upgrading, the MIR is till end of the month so maybe they will lower the price again. Will pull the trigger on the purchase if that happens. Itching for an upgrade...