Did I scorch my new AthlonXP??

[bacon]

Hopefully someone can help me out... I just bought a new computer from components, and put it together. The first time I booted, it started up OK, but the temperature was 52 degrees celcius at 1.4Ghz (stock speed for an athlonxp 1600+)... I thought that was a bit high, even though my apartment was warm, but I ignored it for the moment, and started installing WinXP. The install froze. When I tried to restart my computer, the fans spun up, my drives made their normal starting noises... but nothing happened.

I immediately thought "oh crap, I must have had my heatsink on wrong, and I burned my new chip"... but the weird thing is, the chip doesn't look anything like the horrific pictures at Tom's page... in fact, I can't really tell that it's been scorched at all. It looks pretty much fine, it just doesn't work.

I tried removing everything but the CPU and video card, and I tried the video card in another computer; it worked fine. Any ideas? Did I, in fact, scorch my new CPU, or am I missing something?

Oh, and another thing... isn't the vantec cck-3035D heatsink supposed to be all copper? I have little flakes of copper PAINT flicking off mine. Should I RMA it?

Thanks for any help any of you hardware gurus can provide!!

New stuff I just bought:
AthlonXP 1600+ CPU
Shuttle AK31 v3.1 KT266A motherboard
Two 256MB Crucial PC2100 DDR SDRAM sticks
A 350w sparkle power supply
a Vantec CCK-6035D heatsink/fan
a tube of arctic silver 2 gunk

I already had the following components:
a geforce1 sdr (to be replaced soon with a geforce3 ti200!)
huge steel tower case
IDE DVD drive
SCSI cd-R
an adaptec 2940U2W pci scsi card
3com ethernet card
sblive pci
9GB barracuda 7200rpm scsi drive
3 ide hard drives

 

[OverDose]

tried reseating the memory? reseating all the components? run just one stick of the memory and swap it if it still doesn't post? clear the cmos?

no beep codes?

 

[bacon]

Yes, I tried reseating the memory and all of the components... it doesn't beep at ALL.

I didn't try resetting the CMOS-- you think it might help? Don't these "SoftMenu" type BIOSes drop to default values when boots fail automatically?

I already disassembled the Athlon and am posting this on my old P3-600 clocked at 840...

Thanks for the quick response!!

 

[bacon]

I tried resetting the CMOS, and it booted! Overdose, you are the KING! You are the MAN!

I don't know how much the thanks of an anonymous internet dude means to you, but if it means anything, you've definitely got it! Thanks again!