I received all the components for my new build on Friday and spent the evening putting it together. A task that the HSPC Tech Station made completely painless. I had never seated an LGA style CPU before so I took extra time and care doing that as I had heard horror stories from colleagues about bricking MoBo’s by bending the pins.
Everything went together brilliantly, but when I finally hit the power switch…no post and the mobo speaker was shrieking a series of beeps at me. After a little trouble shooting, re-seating, and reconnecting I finally looked up the codes in the manual it told me I had a “Power Issue”. I was at a loss and baby-stepped through the manual and eventually found out that I had seated the ram in the wrong 3 slots. I had gone off the old rule to start closest to the processor. I guess newer boards assume a large heat-sink and begin a step over. After seating the RAM in the proper slots it booted right up and I checked out the BIOS Setup to makes sure it was seeing everything; it was.
It was late, but I decided to go ahead and get Win7 installed. I was soon greeted by a series of BODS and errors claiming memory issues and corrupt image data. I first tinkered with settings and connections to no avail. By the time I got to running MemTest86, the problem was evident. I ran tests with single sticks and the first stick passed, but the other two failed miserably. I reran the first passing stick to confirm that it wasn’t a fluke and it passed again. I managed to get Win7 installed with the one working stick and started the replacement procedure with NewEgg. After a bit of confusion with the UPS label I am getting it sent off today and will hopefully have the beast up and running again soon.
I am not bitter or anything though, these things happen. You cant crank out these kinds of products at the rates they do and not have a bad one every now and then.