It serves me right for opening my big fucking mouth. It really, really does.
So I finally get an upgrade due to an assist from where I work. Mobo, I7 3770, additional 8gb of memory. Nice. So I go out and buy a used but good shape RX 470 and I've got a replacement HDD coming. So I'm in $150 on this. I gave my brother my old GTX 660ti and I'm officially all in on this new (to me) system.
Run it Sat, Sunday, Monday, update BIOs Monday night, run it on Tuesday. Some gaming was done with the system on Sat, Sunday, Monday and just tooling around on Tuesday.
Hot AF where I live, so I get home and just read more Megg Moog and Owl on my cellphone while sitting in a dark room with a fan, staying cool. Night comes, finally, and I fire up the window fan and play a bit of PS4. I'm winding down for the night and I decide to turn on the pc and see if my XBGP version of The Outer Worlds finished downloading.
Computer powers on, CPU, case and GPU fans are spinning. No beep. No activity from keyboard. Huh. Restart it again. Hard reboot. Clear CMOS. Nope.
Houston, we have a fucking problem.
Remove all add in PCIe cards, disconnect all drives, start in on playing with all four sticks of memory in every memory slot. Nothing. See if the motherboard can figure out if it has no memory installed. Nope. Pull the BIOs SPI chip. Constant reboots, as expected. No change in behavior after CMOS is cleared, again, which leads me to believe that the board is booting to the point where it checks for the presence of a firmware chip but doesn't load shit.
I've seen worse. When the power supply turns on but none of the system fans spin up, you're at no hope. So I've seen worse. Just not with a personal system and not one that I'm $150 into.
I've got a newly flashed BIOs chip, I've got a stick of known good memory to test that I had lying around the house, I have my old system available to test function of PCIe cards and memory. Don't have another Q77 or Z77 motherboard lying around. I can always pull the CPU to test elsewhere but at that point, it aint worth it. I'll return what I can, zero out the old failing HDD, install the backup GPU and just live with it. I could always spend additional on a Z77 or Q77 board but again, they are not as cheap as the price I am willing to pay.
So, if you all are interested/curious about an in depth report of PC gaming in 2020 with a GTX 460 768mb, Amd Kaveri APU and 8gb of ram, I may have the thread series for you next week!!!!
JK, this computer dies, I think I'm out for good. Got my PS4, PS3 and I'll try to get a laptop with an mx350 at some point in the future. Fuck it, I'll go cellphone web access only.