Worst... Upgrade... Ever!

Sucks. Stuff like this is why upgrading or building a computer makes me nervous. People tend to respond in a kneejerk fashion to that and say that "Oh building a computer is easy." Sure it is. Its also tedious and problematic. Once something dies, I don't always have enough parts to *properly* test what is dead. Even if all the parts work, sometimes putting them together is rage worthy (heatsinks and mobo headers I'm looking at you!)

So many people just play "Well, I *guess* this part is bad lets RMA it. Whelp, wasn't that part lets RMA the next part. Nope, wasn't that one so here is the only thing it can be." It resembles a Jerry Springer episode more than troubleshooting. YOU ARE NOT THE FATHER! This type of thing is why customers pay to ship "defective" items back, because it gets abused.

Even if its not a hardware issue, you then face any number of potential driver / software based issues. At the end of the day, I've been lucky and for the most part I've not had any significant trouble with a computer build, but that's not to say I couldn't get a bogus part or two the next time I go to build a computer and end up wasting 20 or 30 hours in the process.

Its all in the context as well that most people don't build a completely new computer, they cannibalize an existing computer, so the end product is either an upgraded computer or no computer. Not having a computer is just cringeworthy.

I always get excited when I get new hardware. Especially a new motherboard and processor. So it's an incredible let down for me when it doesn't work. And then I get obsessed trying to fix it. I figure I could just be doing something wrong. Or maybe I just need to reflash the BIOS. Maybe it doesn't like this particular memory I bought or maybe this or maybe that...

And before I realize it, I've wasted more than a day. And now I'm upset about not having a new toy to play with and all the time I lost because of it.

Oh well. I pissed away enough time. Got my old motherboard back in. And I definitely picked a bad time to be doing an upgrade anyway, right before Christmas.

Bro asus has horrible quality control every single motherboard I've gotten from asus has been bad or DoA I always go with MSI now.

 

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Odd, for my last 2 builds i've used Asus motherboards and never had a problem. Guess i've just lucked out :/

 

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My new 24" Asus LED monitor is awesome. My N series Asus laptop is amazing also. I can't vouch for their desktop hardware though, but everything else seems to be great quality.

 

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When it comes to boards, I almost always go Gigabyte. But that's me.

I had my ASUS board all packed back up and ready to return to NewEgg. But I decided to give it another try, but this time in a different case and power supply.

But first thing I wanted to do was get rid of the RAID0 I was running my OS on. I had no reason to believe RAID was a problem, but figured after all the issues, it would be better to just keep things as simple as possible. So I deleted the RAID. I reinstalled a fresh copy of my OS on one of the SSD drives in my original computer and got that back up and going again.

Then with the new motherboard/processor system, I installed the OS on the other SSD drive for this computer. This time the install went fine. Legacy keyboard worked. Other USB devices working normally as well. CPU sensor and fans working. And no quirky behavior in Windows. I tested this for over a day trying to find anything oddly behaving.

After I was satisfied. I swapped the motherboard into my main case, hooked up my all my other hard drives. And after a couple more days everything now seems to be working great.

I'm still completely baffled why the board was behaving so badly. Maybe something wasn't seated properly, maybe it really didn't like my SSD RAID0, not sure. But I'm finally pretty happy that it's working and I don't have a defective motherboard, processor, or memory.

I now overclocked it to a very modest 4.0GHz. I'll push it further in a few days. I had briefly tested it at 4.5GHz before and quick test results of that seemed positive so far.

I was very close to getting an MSI Z68 GD65 motherboard. It was between the ASUS and MSI boards, because both were advertised as "Gen 3" support, meaning they already support PCI-E 3.0 and Intel Gen 3 Core processors (Ivy Bridge).

My last two motherboards were Gigabyte. I usually like to change things up every other upgrade. So it was time to use something other than Gigabyte this time. Also no Gigabyte board advertised itself as "Gen 3". Though Ivy Bridge may still work on them.

SSD RAID 0 ...are your hard drives really creating a bottleneck to the point that it's cost effective to raid 0 your ssd drives? SSD drives still aren't near my price point where I'll buy one...but that really boggled my mind.

 

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