TR Forums

Hi everyone,

I built this computer 5 or so years ago, and wanted to upgrade the CPU. It's a C2D system with GA-G31M-ES2L motherboard. The original CPU was a E1400, and I am upgrading to a E8400. Before starting the upgrade, the system worked perfectly fine. I bought a used E8400 on eBay, and installed it. Now when I press the power button the system doesn't post, but all the fans turn on. The case power light turns on, and stays solid, but the HDD activity light does not even turn on at all.

Is it possible that I need to flash the bios of the board, is there anything else that I could have done wrong, or did the guy on eBay ship me a busted CPU.

Thanks!

I'd put the old chip back in and flash the newest available bios for your motherboard. If it still fails after that, then you are likely looking at a bad chip.

According to this chart:

http://www.gigabyte.com/support-downloa ... x?pid=3485

Support for the E1400 and E8400 are at the same BIOS revision. That said, this page:

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/produc ... ?pid=3485#

Says there's 4 separate revisions of the board. I checked, and all 4 support both CPUs with the same BIOS. Beginning to look like you've got a bum CPU.

So, long story short... I'm clumsy. In replacing the CPU I had unplugged the power to the HDD. It was a bear to get the CPU cooler back on, and I'm not surprised that I accidentally knocked it off. I discovered this when I put the old E1400 back in.

Now windows is giving me some BS about needing to repair my disk, but the new CPU definitely works!

Thanks, and sorry for the false alarm.

Zyntak09 wrote:

So, long story short... I'm clumsy. In replacing the CPU I had unplugged the power to the HDD. It was a bear to get the CPU cooler back on, and I'm not surprised that I accidentally knocked it off. I discovered this when I put the old E1400 back in.

Now windows is giving me some BS about needing to repair my disk, but the new CPU definitely works!

Thanks, and sorry for the false alarm.

Cool! Glad it's working for you. I used an e8400 as my primary CPU up until last year and it did its job very well.

Actually, I have a follow on question...

The computer boots to the desktop and I can open files but it is SOOOOOO SLOWWWWWWW.... like beyond slow. It barely works. Takes maybe 4 minutes to boot to desktop, but then even trying to do anything is nearly impossible. It takes like 60 seconds to move a word document to a different folder kind of slow. Opening applications is kind of out of the question.

The OS is Win7 x64 Ultimate. I would rather not reinstall the OS, the comp doesn't have a disk drive anymore so it would be a PITA. Is there anything I can try to fix this issue?

Has Windows fallen back to not using DMA on the hard drive?

Hmm, I've never even heard of that option. I'll check it out when I get home tomorrow, thanks for the tip!

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... =windows-7

If Windows gets too many errors whilst accessing the hard drive it disables DMA. If you then fix the issue (often replace a bad cable or fix a bad connection) then it still runs without DMA so is dog slow.