Problems with A8N SLI Premium moboFollow

Hey. I have a couple technical questions about a difficulty I'm having with this motherboard. I've built a few systems in the past, but I've never encountered this problem.

I can't for the life of me get a video feed. I have gone through many troubleshooting steps including reseating cpu, ram and video cards, booting with only one video card and one stick of ram in the B1 slot and I've tried going down the list, booting with no cpu to see if it alerts me no cpu is present. It tells me that no cpu is installed, but when I move to ram, it says nothing.

First question is: With the A8N series, will I be informed that no ram is installed like the cpu?

I've called Asus tech support, and after about an hour of re-doing these troubleshooting steps, the guy informs the that my bios is out of date and needs to be replaced. (...?) Well, alright then... I purchased an up to date bios chip- still no video feed.

Short list of specs-
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego 2000MHz HT Socket 939 Processor Model ADA3700BNBOX
pqi TURBO 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)
eVGA 256-P2-N381 Geforce 6800XT 256MB DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card
Rosewill RP500 ATX 500W Power Supply


Now, when I listed these to the asus tech support guy, he never mentioned any of these not being compatible with the board. I've also read that along with full/partial DOA boards, they can be quite picky about the type of ram you put in them. However, since I was unable to easily locate a more recent list of acceptable ram companies/models, I just stuck with my old PQIs

Which brings me to question two: If not getting a 'no ram' message is normal, would having my old PQI sticks be the possible culprit?

Anyone have any information they can share with me about this situation? I'm pretty frustrated at this point because my new parts are collecting dust in my closet. =(

I appreciate it!

Yeah the plug and play monitor works fine with my old rig. It's pretty dated- Viewsonic A75s, but it is sufficiant.

I bought new ram Wednesday and it just arrived today. I slapped it in there and still nothing. Ill have to get in contact with Asus and attempt to get my money back =/