I just built the first node for a 12 node beowolf cluster I am building for my dad's department at UCSB, and after throwing in the parts to a 2U rackmount chassis, I power it on, and it turns on and does absolutely nothing. All the fans work, the hard drive is going but the monitor is blank and it won't show a POST screen or anything and the hard drive is making no indication of doing anything either.

Specs:
P3 933 133 FSB
some Intel mobo with the 815 chipset
(all below are PCI and on a single riser card that supports 3 PCI devices)
Adaptec 29160 SCSI controller
3Com NIC
PCI Video card (says Savage IX on the GPU)

I'm thinking it's with the PCI cards, but I have no idea.

There are several other threads with the same problem posted (I don't have tome to search for them at the moment) but I can help you narrow it down SOME. It is most likely either your RAM, vid card, mobo, or PSU that is causing the problem.
And btw, it is a Beowolf cluster....... don't you remember senior English?

Ahh thanks for the spelling correction

Well the PSU is fine, it powered more power hungry setups without stability issues.

The video card is brand new.

The mobo and RAM should be fine but I have a spare (well really 11 others =P) to play around with, I guess I'll just have to mess around with it a bunch.

Dou you get a POST beep?
Anyhow, reset the CMOS and try again.

As always when troubleshooting these issues, take out all nonessential hardware, like your NIC and SCSI controller and see how far post gets. Then piece by piece start reinstalling them and rebooting until the problem occurs. Then you have your answer. Just on what you have said so far though, I am gonna put my money on SCSI controller setup in the BIOS.

I stripped it down to the video card only, disconnected all drives and tried it with one of each of the 3 sticks of SDRAM I have and it still won't post. I reset the BIOS, still won't POST. I am going to try swapping the CMOS battery from another mobo I have. If that doesn't work, then I want to say it's the bloody riser card not liking the video card.

Again it's a 3 slot riser card so its like putting 3 PCI devices into one slot. Is there any particular order of card placement I should use on the riser card or is the Intel board just being gayz0r? I know the video card isn't bad, I pulled it and put it into another box and it booted flawlessly.

Edit: Battery failed, so went looking for support for the riser card whcih turned out to be almost non existant (it came with the Skyhawk 2U rackmount chassis that was chosen to be used) and the Skyhawk site only has some small support for the earlier jumper version (the one I have is jumperless rev. 2 of the card) so basically this card is fux0rd and the case is a real piece too, so we're going to look into a new 2U chassis to build a test sample.