Ok well not attack- but I really wished I had a camera last night to capture the carnage. Motherboards balanced on boxes, GPUs poised tip-toe on tiny anti-stat bags, screws everywhere... including embedded in my feet.

Why you ask? Did my current lack of leetskill cause the mother of all ragequits?

Oh no no no! The truth is far more boring than that. I chose to get a new (ish) motherboard reccomended by our beloved resident HH android.
P7N diamond- nice looking board when I pulled it out. An upgrade in chipset for me too and conviently sporting 2 PCI-E 2.0 ports for any upcoming GPU upgrade (hint hint Santa).

Wonderful- its Xmas already- Im beavering away in a mound of packaging, perfect.
Until I start installing my old cooler, bend the fittings and spend the evening ruining it beyond use!

Lucky I did order a new Cooler on a whim which should be arriving today (fingers crossed).
Then I remembered...... Forgot the Thermal paste!! GRRRAHHH!!!!

So for now Im outof action- although im interested to see if this old lump still runs TF If not I see alot of Roms on the horizon!

you have my sympathies. although gonna get a new machine in soon so i might be joining your club as well

As exciting as getting a new machine is, I can fully understand the fear of accidentally screwing it up. You know, pressing too hard as you put the CPU memory or any other component in or realising that for some stupid reason your soundcard doesnt fit properly on the new motherboard.

Getting it all up and running to find that your faced by multiple driver problems and the thing blue screens instantly and you spend an entire weekend trying to pin point the problem before giving up and buying a new part.

Arrrggghh damn you technology!

heres hoping it all works soon!

I used a hammer.

When I was building my current pc a few months back, I was gonna rip everything useful from my old pc (DVD drive, hard drive etc.) and build the new one inside the old shell. When I was fitting the new MB in I realised that the shell was too small. I damned everything to hell, because the stores were already closed and I was anxious to test my new rig out.

*bbzzz bzz bzzz tik tik.... bleep. DING!*
Am I alive? Ahh yes that seems to have done the trick!

Bloody knuckled and back hunched I managed to cram in some components that really were not physically possible to combine. Very nearly had your problem Agent- but I knew the card had been in the case before.
My god-like PC skills managed to bend physics and now all seems stable (touch wood) . It always feels good to finish a build though- which this ended up being as I had to take every damn thing out.... grr.

The old Q6600 cooler I destroyed like an Ape examining an Orange for the first time. I just ripped apart the white plastic clip-tips rendering it dead.
You can tell the last time I built a PC we used screws- what's wrong with screws? screws for gods sake! Screws were easy! It's hard to break a screw.

Anyway I very nearly bust the new cooler via more ramming and bending of said plugs. I was getting quite desperate- this is building up to buying myself a PCI-e 2 card for Chrimbo and like the rest of the normal world my life revolves solely on computers .

I was then hit by a wave of inspiration (ok re-reading a pm from Pilsy)... maybe I should take the un-many angle of examing this strange paper reading-material that seems to be lying in the box- how odd.
Still partially baffled by these clasps (and the mobo making them stupid-hard to access) I finally locked the thing down.
The manufacturers bodge job of a blob of crusty thermal paste had meant my stock cooler was running @ 40.c in BIOS in the past, now its a much happier 25-26 again sat in BIOS.

Yet to test a game or verify system under stress- but system has been running stable enough within OS for ages.

Not counting my chickens but looks like I will have some possible bargains (poss 'P5N32E-sli plus' mobo and 8800GTXoc with 4gb of DDR2-667) which I'll naturally post on our 'Sale' board before I ebay it.

So a (battered) thumbs up for now. Once I've had a cable tidy Ill get some shots of my bleeding hand and the system that caused it.

Hmm glad i didnt count those chickens.

Performance on the new board with a single GPU seems worse than when i pulled a card before.

I was looking at over 25% performance loss in Far Cry 2- a game that flew with the sli mobo. Assassin's creed, a game on the borders of smoothness when cranked, was rendered jerky

This board does have another PCIe 1.0 slot but it runs @ 8x and un-reachable underneath the current dual slot card

I'm not even sure if it's the lack of another card at all. Disabling one never used to make a huge deal of difference.

Does anyone know if PCIe 2.0 slots are compatible with 1.0?- this might solve my problem as I could then use both cards until I buy a 260/280.

Topic has become split....

My current woes are printed here:http://www.thehh.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=2648&p=36043&sid=bac0dbef3fd2744828c6127d8398d280&sid=bac0dbef3fd2744828c6127d8398d280#p36043

Any help/ ideas welcome as have to send board back on Monday if it's still iffy!