The Harrowing Tale of Building my New PC or: How I Learned to Love the Newegg Part 2

Ive discussed the fun I had with the monitors, now for the fun Ive been having with the actual computer!

I ordered from Newegg and a couple days later everything is waiting for me:

Original parts list:

• Dual Radeon HD 5970 Graphic Cards
• EVGA E758-A1 3-Way SLI Motherboard
• 2 640Gb + 1 720 Gb WD Caviar Black Hard drives
• Intel Core i7 930 Processor
• 6 Gb OCZ Gold DDR3 RAM
• CoolerMaster HAF 932 Full tower Case
• Enermax Galaxy EVO 1250 Watt Power Supply
• Coarsair H50 Watercooler

So I set out to get everything pieced together:

And get it all together:

This looks great, but my room was turned into a disaster zone:

I fire it up and it won't POST. I probably should have just put in the processor and some RAM and tested it but it sure does look pretty when everything is put together. Anyways, I take out all but 1 stick of RAM and remove one of the graphics cards. POST's just fine. Add in the RAM and try again, and it won't POST again. I know for a fact that the RAM is good because it literally just came out of my other computer which was running it just fine. So I start fiddling and I find out that it will POST with memory in slots 1 and 5 but not 3. So I think its a bad motherboard. I get my old computer running again and RMA the board through Newegg.

Couple days later the new motherboard arrives and what do you know, same issue. So I have my friend come over and start really getting into this issue. We test every stick of RAM in every slot. Turns out slots 3 and 4 are bad. We figure the chances of getting 2 boards with the same issue are incredibly low so we think maybe the memory controller on the processor is bad. We swap processors but my board still has the same problem, and his board boots up just fine. I have no choice but to RMA another board. After some complaining and reminding Newegg of how much I spend there they give me a refund and I buy a Gigabyte board.

So instead of the EVGA board, the semi-final parts list contains a

• Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 motherboard

Couple more days later the new board arrives. I build everything up and try to fire it up. Fans turn on for a second then everything dies. At this point I want to kill someone. I take it to my friends house for some extreme troubleshooting and as it turns out I'm an idiot. I had screwed in all the motherboard spacers, which caused a short circuit. We took out all the unnecessary spacers and the board fired up no problem.

At this point, I have my computer at stock speeds and a single 1920x1080 monitor. Games run extremely well with max settings. In my next post I will talk about overclocking and Eyefinity and some of the trouble I had with those.