just brew it! wrote:Any guess whether the pin came that way, or if it happened during system assembly?
I remember the big stink people raised back in 2004 when Intel switched to LGA CPUs. But the predicted mountains of dead motherboards never materialized. Seems to me a bent pin is a bent pin; it sucks regardless of whether the pin is on the CPU or motherboard. (And these days, more likely than not you've paid more for the CPU anyway...)
Not very sure, I wasn't really looking when I did the assembly. It took the guy at the shop a good 30 seconds to spot the bent pin, it's not something you'd notice straight away unless you were looking for it.
At least that was sorted. Had another 24 hours of drama as I tried to install Windows 7. Installation would complete and when it tried to configure files, it would crash. It did that subsequent times when the Windows logo appeared. I was going nuts disabling the internal USB 3.0 and other parts, copying the ISO over to the USB stick multiple times etc. Read online that it could have been the PSU and nearly wanted to go out to get one. The last item I checked was the graphics card. It's good that the Z68 chipset allows you to utilise both an external graphics card or the integrated graphics of the core i5. Took my Radeon 4850 out and it booted to Windows fine.
I put the card back in and it crashed again. At least now that the configuration was completed, I could boot into safe mode, grab the latest ATI drivers, and Windows is working fine now. I'm kind of stumped, as I installed Windows 7 fine on my AMD system (which was another headache back then where a 20 minute install took a few hours because of the crappy AHCI problem with the 780G motherboards) with the same exact video card and PSU.
Sometimes it's quite daunting to assemble your own PC when so many things could go wrong and troubleshooting is like finding a needle in a haystack.
At least the performance improvement is very noticeable, so the pain was short lived.