First post, by Skyscraper
A case studly in utter stupidity.
No one becomes an expert in anything without trying, this is however an example showing that some people should just stay away from the innards of computers.
About a year ago I bought a motherboard, CPU and memory bundle on the Swedish Ebay site Tradera.com. The CPU type wasnt specified but the bundle was according to the seller removed from a working system.
The motherboard is an Asus P5ND2-SLI Deluxe nForce4 SLI Socket 775 motherboard, I bought it because I diddnt own any nForce4 chipset motherboard for Intel CPUs. The bundle came assembled, I diddnt even test it as it came well packaged and looked good, I put the bundle in a box where it stayed until late yesterday evening. Today I was going to use the bundle to test the X1950XTX I bought but there were some issues...
I mounted the X1950XTX on the motherboard, conneced a Corsair AX1200 PSU and hit the "power switch", the board powered on but would not post. I tried a few more times and then started investigating, the first thing I did was to download the manual. After checking the CLR CMOS jumper I found that it was in the wrong position, easily rectified but the board was still not posting.
The next thing I did was to remove the cooler, here I found issue number two, the cooler was mounted in the wrong orientation so it interfered with the caps around the socket and made zero conteact with the CPU. Then on to issue number three, the CPU was a Pentium E2140, the motherboard only supports Pentium 4 and the first generation Pentium D. Now I turned my attention to the metal back plate, issue number four. The backplate was mounted flat against the board without insulation and shorted 100 solder points or so.
After fixing all these issues the motherboard posted at the first power on with a S775 Pentium 4 3.4 EE Gallatin.
I do normally not have issues with other people making mistakes but God damn it there are limits.
This is the bundle as it came, notice the position of the CPU fan cable.
The heat sink it did not make very good contact with the CPU.
Here we can see why, this picture is taken when I test mounted the heatsink correctly but you can see the cutouts in the heatsink and compare them to the position of the fan cable in the first picture...
And finally Victory!
New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.