My friend got done with his first build yesterday. It all works flawlessly, however something concerns him. When he first powers up his computer, the motherboard light and fans start up, but then it powers down a second later, waits a second more, then proceeds to normal boot. Why is this? Could it be because something other than the hard-drive is the primary boot device? That's what I suspect.
This is normal POST behaviour on some boards that, IIRC, do the following procedure:
This is especially common on boards with a redundant BIOS in place ready to be flashed if the main is corrupt (and thus fails its self-test).