Motherboard woes - question

[DarciisFyer]

A bit windy first post, the main question I have is in the last paragraph.

Here's the rig I got just last week:
Intel Conroe e6400 w/ Thermalright si-120 w/ Thermalright 478->775 adapter
Gigabyte DS3 w/ Zalman NBF47 northbridge cooler
Corsair xms2 5400 2x1gb
Gigabyte silent 7600gt
Seasonic 380w s-12
Chaintech av-710
Samsung DVD-burner
Antec Solo
fans,keyboard,mice,floppy,rheobus,etc

I did a basic POST test (cpu+ram+gpu) and it worked, then added sound card and burner and it didn't post, so I went back to basics, but now nothing worked. Went through a lot of permutations, all failed, so I started over from scratch i.e. remove and reinstall everything including heatsinks.

Basic post worked this time, so I went on my merry way adding components until everything stopped working, AGAIN. A few more hours of testing later I recalled how much force I needed to push the SI-120 into the retention bracket, so I took off the thing and just held it still with my hands, and lo and behold, it posted. My suspicion was that the inordinate amount of force required by the 478 retention bracket adapter was ill received by the 775 socket, so it would work for a while, then fail. I'm now chugging along happily after using some pliers and forcing the heatsink "hooks" to a lower position and not fully screwing the adapter's backplate. Lesson learned: warping your motherboard is baaad. Thermalright really should put a warning on their 478-->775 adapters or something.

With everything said and done, I'm wondering if there's any permanent damage done to this motherboard, like will it show flakyness later on, and whether anyone else has had such a predicament?

 

[Baked]

There's this thing called flashing the BIOS.

 

[DarciisFyer]

Yes, I probably would have done that if it POSTed when I went back to basics (cpu/gpu/ram). This board's faulty BIOS is well known. The fact that it didn't made me suspect otherwise. I also threw in a lot of cmos clearing during my failed testing for good measure. In fact, flashing the bios was the first thing I did after my full hardware POSTed, even before I hooked up a hard drive. Although you're right in that I could've flashed first thing no matter what.

 

[Baked]

Have you tried booting the system w/ just 1 stick of RAM instead of two, and changing the vmem to RAM spec?

 

[Dragoon42]

Originally posted by: Baked
Have you tried booting the system w/ just 1 stick of RAM instead of two, and changing the vmem to RAM spec?

it's a longshot but that corsair should boot. It doesn't seem like i't sbeen picky with corsair ram. That's kind of wierd? PSU maybe? Coz you said it works fine with some, but when you add stuff it doesn't work. Is that psu new or old? 380 watts should be enough, but I don't really know. It's worth a shot though

 

[DarciisFyer]

I've already solved the problem, it was an issue of the thermalright 478->775 adapter placing too much stress on the socket. I outlined my troubles in the interests of shared knowledge (in case someone else uses that adapter) and context. My question is, has anyone else had component stress push a motherboard over the edge of operability and if I should RMA this motherboard anyway?

Yes, when I was troubleshooting I tried many things like take out a ramstick, point a large fan at the motherboard, and test psu rails with a multimeter. I figured out the problem after I noticed things always worked right after I finished assembling everything and failed right after.