Don Burnette wrote:
Here's one for the books, if anyone has any idea what I did wrong, I would
be curious to know, as I don't want this to happen again.

Did you remove standby power and take ESD precautions while working
inside the case? Failure to do either or both could have killed your
motherboard.

The chances of damage are very low - I know people who have built and
upgraded many computers with standby power on and a poke at the case to
discharge static electricity, and gotten away with it, but sooner or
later...

OTOH, it's more likely your motherboard just died naturally at the same
time you decided to install a new CPU. - cooling and warming cycles
stress electronic components, so they tend to fail at power on or
shortly thereafter rather than while running. The board might have
failed then even if you'd just shut down & taken the cover off to blow
dust out.

Another possibility is solder failure - the board always flexes a bit
during cooler installation, which can be the last straw for a bad solder
joint.

I had an A7N8X Deluxe version 1.4. Had always been rock solid for me. I was
running an Athlon XP2400+ in it, and decided to drop an Athlon XP 2600+
Barton in it, since the prices were so reasonable now.

I hve built many computers, and upgraded cpu's many times with no problems.
So I get the new chip, install it, install a Thermalrite SLK900 heatsink w/
92mm fan, using Arctic Silver 3.
Turned it on, immediately went into bios to correctly set the fsb. Exited
saving changes, and it started to boot, then gave some error message about
cpu changing, then shut itself off.
Try as I might, I could not get it to post again. I would turn it on, the
hdd activity light would stay solid, and it would not even post. I checked
all my connections, verified everything was correct, still no go. I reseated
all my cards and ram, no go. I took everything out but video card, no go. I
tried clearing the cmos, still no go.
No post, no beeps, nothing. Monitor's power led was orange rather than
green, so it obviously was not getting a signal.
Treid replacing the cmos battery, and clearing it again - still , no post.
Tried putting the XP2400+ chip back in, to make sure the new Barton chip was
not bad. Still, no post..

At a loss, I figured I must have somehow fried my motherboard. So, I orded a
new A7N8X Deluxe version 2, and had it overnighted in from Newegg.com.
Put the new motherboard in, hooked everything up, including putting my new
Barton 2600+ with SLK 900 h/s, and she posted and booted just fine, and has
been running fine for the last 4 hours so far.

What in the world could have happened? This one has me stumped.
I did everthing correct, so I thought. I did it like I always do. I never
could get that mb to post again.

I am just curious, any ideas on what may have gone wrong? Seems like I
remember reading on these forums some cmos issue these earlier boards had
that could render them dead maybe??


OH, and one last question. I installed the Asus drivers off the included cd
rom. Any advantage to updating to the newer drivers from Nvidia.com?

Thanks,