Oh, mother(board)

Back in January I upgraded some components in my PC as it had been nearly four years and the itch to upgrade was no longer possible to resist. It turns out I picked a new Intel motherboard that had a nasty flaw in it and even though I never experienced the flaw and with the way my machine was configured, never would, I nonetheless took the opportunity to get it exchanged free for a newer revision sans flaw.

In the interim I also got a snazzy new case that was bigger because I hate working in cramped cases.

Yesterday at 2 p.m. I was back from NCIX with the new motherboard in hand.

When I went to bed at midnight I had:

a) missed my run
b) cut my thumb
c) missed dinner
d) was cramped and sore throughout my lower body due to all the stooping, bending, crouching and straining

and

e) did not have a functioning computer

I resigned myself to taking the motherboard back to NCIX today, explaining to them how it would not power up at all. Then I noticed I had inserted the power switch lead one pin too far to the left. I corrected this and the system powered up. Doh. Next I got a report that the CPU was too hot — 97ºC! And this after a few moment of being on. I eventually popped the motherboard back out and found that two of the four pins holding the HSF down had not gone all the way through the sockets in the motherboard, so it was slightly off-kilter and ‘hot’. I corrected this and the warning went away.

Finally, after hooking up the DVD drive and three hard drives, I discovered that I had forgotten to connect an SATA power cable to the DVD drive. The only way to fix this would be to disconnect and rearrange all of the drives. Or buy a $5 4-pin molex to SAT adapter cable and use that instead. Which I did.

So finally after numerous problems of my own making the PC is back together in its new case and working fine (for now). The fans are gigantic and a bit loud but I may tweak those later. For now, I am merely relieved to be done. No wonder people like iMacs. 😛

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