This is my tale of woe Watch out, it's an extremely long one. NOTE: Spellcheck? What's that? :NOTE I was all excited. I was getting a whole new setup! I had given my old comp away to my girlfriend, I didn't need it any more, I was getting a new setup! And it arrives! I quickly read manuals and set it up. Here's the specs of my new setup: Asus A7N8x Deluxe Athlon 2200+ XP Thermaltake Volcano 7+ 2x512mb Crucial DDR 333MHz 60Gb Maxtor 12x Panasonic 52/24/52 Memorex CD-RW Asus GeForce4 Ti4400 AGP 128MB ATI Radeon 9000 PCI 32MB 19" Viewsonic Monitor 17" :Enter brand here: Monitor Addtronics Case 300W Power Supply So, I set everything up, install a clean copy of WinXP Pro, and away I go! It's flying. I get 10,000+ in 3dMark2001SE. Rock! Goto look at other ppl's score with a similar setup. Hrm, these ppl are getting 12,000s and they don't have a quarter the system memory I do. Perhaps I should overclock...my fatal error. So, I reboot, go into BIOS, bump the FSB up to 140 from 133. It posts, I go into BIOS, bump it up to 150, it posts. 160, no boot, so I reset the CMOS. Jump it up to 155, it posts. Try 158, no post, reset CMOS. All the while I'm making sure that I don't kill my memory by at least underclocking it. So, I try 157, no post, reset CMOS. 155 again, no post....weird. Reset CMOS, try 154, no post. Reset CMOS, no post. I had reset the CMOS and the system won't post....what the f*ck?!?! I fried my processor No wait, that couldn't be what happened. Let me try again. Take everything out of the comp except CPU, HSF, Memory and PCI video card. No post. ARGGGGGG! take out the PCI and the Memory, no post. Take out the CPU, and get an audio error (In case you didn't know, the A7N8X Deluxe has a voice that plays over the audio out that tells you errors. Really freaked me out the first time when I heard "System completed power on self test. Booting to operating system" coming from my computer speakers) saying "No CPU found". Crap, it can't post because of my CPU I decide, since when I put the CPU in, I don't get an error saying "No memory found". Head to work and have to tell my fellow tech dork employee's how I killed my new comp the night I got it. Get laughed at, and decide not to give up. Head over to my gf's house to spend time with her, and bring my mobo/cpu/hsf/memory/pci vid along to see if I can't fix it using some of the old parts from my old comp I gave her. Well, get there, and pull the 900MHz Athlon T-Bird out of the old comp to try on my new mobo. Plug it in, still NO POST. Son of a b*tch. So, brainstorm! Try my CPU in the old comp. IT WORKS! So, my CPU is fine, I wonder if it's some obscure motherboard switch I don't know about. Go to replace the old Athlon in the old comp, and destroy it. MOTHERF***ER!!! Stupid f***ing GOrb!! Start googling and posting on the greatest forum ever (Hint: This one). Find out that a LOT of ppl aren't posting with there A7N8X's. Hrm, my hopes flourish. I read, and try every crazy thing posted, from reseting the CMOS while the moon is aligned with Jupiter to dancing about it to try and banish the "bad technology gnomes" from within. No avail. Okay, not giving up yet. Get home and pull a no holds bar on this motherf***er. Here's my results Am going to have to send this thing back, cross country (US) to get it replaced. And here's some pics to demonstrate my frustration The battle raged on for many an hour, with no hope in sight Just waiting to be used MURDER!!! OJ would be proud of this massacre. So, there you have it. Sorry for the length of this thing, but I had to vent. Perhaps someone can learn from my mistakes.
Owie.. Sorry to hear it. I've had good luck with the A7N8X, so far. I'm having a bit of weirdness with overclocking with the new 1002a bios, though. But I feel your pain..I lost a beloved Duron 700 due to a bad mobo. RIP, little proc.
It would have died even if you hadn't overclocked it...i feel for you though. I remember when I first tried overclocking (my first computer was a Pentium 133 I built myself...in 2001 ) and I accidentally bumped the voltage up too high. That was the first time I saw the magic smoke Still, the board and chip only cost me £10.
Eeek. I feel for ya. I've been having bad luck with overclocking lately. I've killed an AMD XP 2200+, and cracked the core on a 1700+ within the past month.
You are joking right, The OS has nothing to do wether a computer POST's or not. I installed win XP over a year ago and it ran ultra stable with 0 crashes, this computer was a test development computer so I sure put it through its paces envolving a heavy loads of software and video editing. Personally I prefer a full patched up Windows 2000 Professional.
I want pics!!! /me starts to picket around the forum and demand better wages or pictures... one or the other buddy. I know the pain, right now I am without a comp due to another dead 1700 (my second).
I know the pain.. my p4 1.5 Ghz is burnt out... (no overclockong involved) no magical smoke though. As it turned out, the trip back from the animationcontest had nocked the cummy stock heat sink off a bit... and to think my cpu wasn't beepin away at me for a whole half hour in Unreal 2??? then click... the screen went blank and then I thought "HEY... what the blankedy blank blank!" So I shut it off... opened it up.. everything looked fine, so I turned it back on and no post or anything... then I began taking it apart and noticed the DREADED HORRIBLE cpu clamp sitting off on one side. but the heat sink was still sitting on just fine, so I guess what happened was the heat sink was being nocked and nudged around got some air packets between it and the proc. It has been about 2 weeks now since I had it running last... but the mobo, proc, and ram are away in warrenty and the results of it should come back in less than 2 days. Maybe I will be forced to buy a new mobo as well as proc.. if a new mobo is needed that is... And to think I overclocked my geforce 2 mx 400 from 175 to 233 MHz without even making it lock up let alone burn out on purpose just for an excuse to "upgrade" LOL Stupid Processor.. I think me gonna bring a toolkit and some poopy radioshack hs greese and redo every time... or maybe not.. it 5 bucks for 10 grams... LOL
