MT New build

[slinki]

Was that the Asus P5K SE, soul? I was planning on getting that one.

So far from my experience, my MB don't buy list includes MSI and Abit. Both have died on me and I was going to give Asus a go. What is a good alternative with the intel chipset for the core 2 and quad?

[{OF}MillerTime]

it is/was the Asus P5K SE. I have an asus now for my amd3400.

i welcome alternatives. problem is there are only a bazillion to pick from.

[Soul]

I bought a gigabyte board, that arrives today, I will let you know how it turns out.

This was my first Asus board so I was a bit disappointed that it was bad, but bad boards happen to every manufacturer, I guess in the end it comes down to luck of the draw. I was going to go with Abit as I have had lots of their boards in the past with out issue, however as slinki stated, he got a bad one.

[Soul]

Time for an update and sorry to say it isn't good...

New board arrived on Friday, today I got around to putting it in and.... it appears to be dead. That makes 2 boards from newegg that have been DOA.

The new board doesn't get power to it at all, nothing, nadda, zilch. I did the whole thing of having it out side the case to make sure it wasn't shorting, tried it with out any devices hooked up, moving memory around, checking the cpu. All seemed fine, the fact that the board doesn't show any sings of power points to a bad board to me (tried a 2nd power supply and same result the original is running my current system with no issue). With the Asus, the board would power, just not post.

So for now I am unsure what I am going to do, I am tired of not having a working system, I am thinking of heading out to the local MicroCenter tomorrow and picking up a board, at least if it is bad I can take it back with out having the hassles of shipping. I don't see it being the memory or cpu... perhaps tomorrow will be better, at least FoS didn't go down this time

I have yet to contact newegg about getting another bad board, I am sure they will take it back, just not sure I want to bother getting another one from them. I have bought more system components from newegg than I can count, for myself and building for my friends and family and I have never had this kind of problem before.

Frustrating to be sure.

[{OF}Blong]

well that suxors. Good thing I got a few years till I can upgrade again lol.

[{OF}G_Man]

Originally Posted by Soul

Time for an update and sorry to say it isn't good...

With the Asus, the board would power, just not post.


Frustrating to be sure.

Soul, you have probably considered this already, but I had the same problem with 2 older ASUS mobds. Would power up but not post. & BTW this is the only problem I have had with ASUS mobds.

I bought a P5TE with a 2.2 ghz pentium 4. Put it all together and no post.
Luckily I had purchased the parts locally from where Farty used to work.

Turns out that it needed a bios upgrade in order to be able to support any CPU above 1.8GHZ. Farty figured this out, put in a 1.8GHZ, flashed the bios, and my 2.2 worked fine and posted properly after that. Like wtf could I do. Couldn't post with the 2.2, so couldn't upgrade bios. Catch 22.

It's a long shot that it would be the same type of problem.

Also have you considered the CPU might be bad??

[Soul]

I thought that on the asus board, but according to the info that was on the mobo sticker my proc was good to go with the bios that was loaded, but like you said, how could I know for sure since I can't update it.

I am not ruling out the cpu, I just know more often mobo's are what go bad, with any bit of luck tomorrow will be a better day.

[Soul]

Time for an update, returned the mobo to newegg and was dead set on not getting another one from them since they wouldn't cross ship. So I ended up getting the mobo at my local Microcenter for the same price as I did at newegg.

The mobo I went with : a GA-P35-DS3L

So once I got the board and got everything hooked up, I turned it on and... the damn thing didn't spin up, further investigation showed that I missed a board riser from my old board and I think it was shorting out, either that or something wasn't plugged in tight. After removal of the board riser, and plugging everything in we had lift off.

On to load Vista Ultimate - this was a killer - my dvd/cdrom is an old ide drive, and during the install process vista couldn't see it anymore, so after finding the right driver I was under way. (nice feature of vista is being able to stick in a usb key and browse to the driver after you have started no need to reboot)

However I was met with a few blue screens, determined to be a bad stick of memory, so down to 1 2gb stick I finished the install and things were running perfect, literally perfect.

I decided to RMA the ram with gskill instead of newegg and found out I have to send back both sticks, so I ordered another 4gb kit that I am using now and am sending the other 4gb in for replacement, when it comes back I will be cruising along at 8gb.

In the end here is what I ended up with (or will when the memory comes in)

• GA-P35-DS3L Motherboard
• Intel Quad Core Q6600 @ 2.4ghz
• 4 sticks of PC2 6400 2gb
• Soundblaster Xfi Music
• eVGA 8800 GTS 640
• 40gb 10k RPM WD SATA hard drive (for the os)
• 300gb 7200 RPM WD SATA hard drive (for data)
• Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150
• Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit

[{OF}Malicious Assault]

Sweet, Glad your up and running Nice system. Glad you finally worked out the problems with the Mobo. Hope to see you out gaming soon

[{OF}MillerTime]

lemme know how games are doing when you can