If you've skimmed through a few of my posts over the past month, you'll have seen the occasional snarky remark bitching about PC parts and whinging about a motherboard that was Dead On Arrival and a PSU that shorted out.
On the 17th of September I ordered all the parts for an epic PC.
- Intel i7 12700KF processor
- Gigabyte Geforce RTX 3080TI Gaming OC graphics card
- Asus TUF Gaming Z690 motherboard
And of course, liquid cooling, fans, a spiffy case, storage, RAM, a power supply, etc, etc, etc. Everything a PC needs! I wanted ROG Strix stuff, but, beggars can't be choosers. They were all sold out. 😅 These would do just as well!!
It all arrived on the 26th of September and I squealed with glee. Took photos of my goodies. And waited for my partner to get home from work so he could build it for me. I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing when it comes to the innards of a PC — except reseating things and replacing RAM and graphics cards — whereas my partner has built several PCs and was looking forward to getting mine up and running for me.
Unfortunately it wasn't to be. Everything was connected properly, we turned it on for the first time, everything seemed to POST, but the monitor wouldn't receive a signal. We tried another. And another. We tried HDMI and DVI connections. There was nothing. The motherboard displayed a white vga error light. We didn't know what was wrong.
The third time we tried to turn it on, the power supply tripped. Then it kept tripping. Over and over and over. All investigations pointed to either a faulty power supply or a faulty motherboard.
We tried my graphics card in my partner's current build and that worked, thankfully, but not wanting to dissect his PC, we couldn't test everything else. So I called around all the local computer stores and ordered a new power supply, hoping that's all it was.
The new power supply arrived, and there was no more tripping. Power supply issue fixed! But... there was still no signal and the motherboard still had a white vga error light.
I returned it to the store I ordered it from (in another state) and asked them to test it. They, of course, had a sharp increase in returns lately so it took two and a half weeks before they got to my item, after it had spent a previous week in transit to get to them.
Of course my item tested completely fine for them, so they went to return it to me. Some people on various forums had a similar vga error, and for them it was because the BIOS wasn't up to date. So just in case, I asked them to update the BIOS before sending it back. They did so, happily.
When explaining my issue to the technician, they suggested it could also either be my CPU or RAM. A faulty CPU is exceptionally rare, but it was possible. And they offered to do a warranty return form up for those items to also test them for me.
Australians, if you ever buy from PC Case Gear and you have an issue with your purchase, please know that they have exceptional customer service and their technicians are friendly as hell.
Because I didn't want to wait another damned month, I told them I'd take it to my local PC repair place and get them to test these items, and if they were faulty then I'd do up a return.
Lo and behold. ONE stick of RAM was faulty. All of this for ONE stick of RAM.
The thing is... we tested all of the RAM. Isolating them one by one and it still didn't work. But only one of them tested faulty, not all of them. So, naturally, we were confused.
Instead of bothering with a return for the one stick of RAM — because I would've had to have returned the entire batch just for one faulty stick — I decided to just use two that didn't test faulty and buy another two sticks at another date. I just wanted this thing working. While 32gb of RAM would've been great, I'll happily stick with 16gb for now if this damned thing just worked.
On the 1st of November I got my motherboard back.
We reconnected it all, made sure everything was perfect and properly seated, and powered it on.
Aaaand... ... ... ...
... ... ...
It still didn't fucking work. Every single component in this machine had tested as working elsewhere, but just didn't work here. So we took the damned thing to the local repair place and asked them to deal with it.
Today, the 4th of November, the tech called us back. He had worked it out and it was such a non-job he didn't even ask us to pay for his time.
Want to know what it was?
The graphics card wasn't seated properly. Which is bloody ridiculous because we reseated everything in this machine twenty thousand times. But apparently it needed a good punch to be seated properly and LO, the friggen thing is working now. (Please re-read us testing the same graphics card in another build and having it work. We know how to seat a damned GPU. The PCI-e slot in the ASUS motherboard I'm using is apparently just a temperamental bitch.)
I would be pissed off that that's all it was, but at the moment I'm just relieved it's finally working.
It was a major pain in the arse but my glorious gaming PC is built at last and ready and it's time to put 'er through her paces. 🙂
Looking forward to sharing my new gaming experiences with you all, soon!
Until next time! ⭐️🖥💻