I Hate Technology

I hate the fact that we live in an era of such superior science, yet we cannot get parts out of a box that work right away.

Here are the specs for my new computer:

Intel Corei7 940 2.98 Ghz cpu
ASUS P6X58D-E mo'bo
3x2GB sticks of Kingston 1600 DDR3 RAM
Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic Ed (stock OC) (I did not purchase this for this update, I've had this card for about 8 months now).
2 x 80GB OCZ SSD's
1200w PSU (Thortech Thunderbolt Modular)
NZXT Phantom Full ATX tower
CoolerMaster aftermarket heatsink/fan


The Phantom tower is awesome.  I am so glad I got a full case this time instead of a mid.  The Radeon 5850 is around 10 inches long, so trying to get that in to a mid case was horrible.  I also like that I can hide most of my cabling behind the right panel so the front looks clean.  I'm also ribbon (IDE) free!

The RAM was pretty to look at if that means anything.  And the motherboard was nice and sleek.  The cooling apparatuses were low profile, giving me plenty of room to work.

SSD's are so fun.  I like how tiny they are.

My first concern was installing the CPU.  This is the first CPU of it's kind that I'm installing.  The last CPU I installed still had pins on the processor itself and it fit in, nice and snug.  With these newer CPU's there are no pins on them.  Just gold contacts.  So I made sure I found the little triangle arrow and lined that up with the triangle arrow on the motherboard and set it down.  It still had some wiggle room.  I wasn't sure if I was doing that correctly and no directions I looked at could tell me yay or nay if that was supposed to happen.  It looked right ... as far as I could tell.

I flipped the metal enclosure down and then pushed the locking lever down.  When I did this, I heard a crinkling sort of sound from the CPU, like it was crushing little metal pins that aren't supposed to be crushed.  Worried, I unlocked the lever, and flipped up the metal enclosure back up.  I looked at the CPU and saw nothing wrong with it (again, only as far as I could tell) and looked at the CPU slot on the motherboard.  Could tell if anything was bent or not.  So I put it back and closed the metal flap, and crushed the lever down as gently as I could until it locked.  I crossed my fingers then, hoping I wasn't breaking anything.

The CoolerMaster aftermarket heat sink and fan I bought, while nice, was a pain in the ass to install.  First off, the directions are terrible.  I can see what they were going for well after the fact but trying to differentiate between two set ups (one for Socket 775 and AM2/3 CPU's, and then Socket 1155/56/1366) was a little much to shove on one side of the paper.  Not to mention they need about 80 languages to describe how to install it, but nothing was descriptive enough.  I ended up getting most of what I needed out of the pictures/diagrams once I figured out there were two different sets of instructions.

And I still don't know if I installed it right.  The contact of the heatsink to the CPU still had some give.  I could sort of slide the heat sink around on top of the arctic silver.  It was very minimal movement; maybe an 8th of an inch, but enough to make me worry.  I've never done after market CPU heatsink/fan.

The aftermarket heatsink and fan was the worst part and took the longest.  My boyfriend had to help me He-Man a few nuts down to anchor the support bracket for the heatsink/fan to the motherboard.  That was scary and I think this ultimately caused the problem I experienced.

I got everything in the case.  Mo'bo, PSU, CPU, RAM, video card, SSD's and then hooked it all up.  Grabbed an HDMI cable and plugged it in to the t.v. upstairs (for shits) and also plugged in my 4GB USB bootable flash drive.  Plugged in power cable, flipped the back switch.  Gave it a couple seconds and then hit the power on the case.

Everything turned on.  And when I mean everything, I mean everything.  Including the fucking DRAM LED.

I hate the DRAM LED.  It is now the bane of my existence.  Once I saw this, I immediately started Googling everything I could to figure out wtf was going on.  The computer wasn't going through POST, t.v. wouldn't come out of the "no signal" mode.  I disconnected and reconnected everything.  I tried various combinations of the 3 sticks of RAM I had in various combinations of slots (going between the two sets).  No dice.  I read that if the RAM were a problem, I'd be getting an internal speaker beep (if that was connected).  So I plugged that in after shutting the machine off, and then turned it back on.  No beeping whatsoever.  I even tried it without any RAM installed and heard nothing, which is completely wrong because if you have no RAM installed, the speaker definitely will beep.

Reset the CMOS (three different ways, reset button on the I/O panel, manuel reset by moving the pin cap from 1-2 to 2-3 on the CMOS connection, and popped the CMOS battery off the board for 5 minutes).  Nothing helped.  MemOK! button doesn't do shit, held that down for 3+ minutes, and the light never changed.

So from the first power up, the motherboard would not work.  I couldn't boot in to anything.  I couldn't do a bios update, I couldn't get the thing to POST.  Nothing.  While doing research I realized a lot of people with this board have had similar problems.  I made sure to buy RAM that was certified for this board to use, and I'm fairly certain the RAM is not the issue.

So I've set up an RMA for the motherboard.  Hopefully they can replace it quickly because I need that board asap.  I'm just frustrated that we can't get parts out of the box that just fucking work.  It's the first ASUS board I ever bought as well, I moved away from MSI because their boards are bulky with lots of raised cooling apparatuses that would get in the way of aftermarket heat sinks/fans.

I'll post later when I get the new board.  For now, my computer is sitting in pieces in the living room on a work table.  It'll probably be like that for a week.  /sadpanda.