Long dark tunnel.

Was going to explain all this but after five hours of WWF with a Survivor on my bedroom floor I CBA. So pics will have to do.

motherboard.jpg


IO-1.jpg


inside-5.jpg


backside-1.jpg
 
Can't sleep so I decided to get some more done.

Fitted the molex modular cable. Wired up the DVD, LEDs fans and so on.

Fitted the ram and test fired the PC with no CPU in. Fired up like a champ.

Now I know I picked the right ram for this board...

ram-2.jpg


You may have noticed I mentioned getting a white LED fan for £4.99? Placement is key when you're on a budget. Project has now been renamed 'Brittania' I shall leave you to figure it out
wink.gif


lights-1.jpg


Front. Logo switch is now wired up so I can switch off the logo.

frontandlogo.jpg


And after some subtle mods the fan is now in and running.

frontfan.jpg
 
It's a shame I never notice subtle things..

What I should have done was download the manual at first and then I would have saved myself some aggro.

Third or fourth page of the manual...

"Fox Update (tm) comes with the motherboard on the utilities CD. It allows you to connect to the Quantum website and automatically download and install the latest bios. It also allows you to load a bios and install that one within Windows"

Well, that'll teach me. I'm now an IDE user
laugh.gif


Mind you reading the manual has thrown up some awesome sauce. It's dual bios for a start. You have have them auto detect or force certain ones to come on. Sooo. What I'll do is put on this beta bios that allows the 4 series to work and then use the other one for trying out future bioses
smile.gif
 
Well, another day passes and I get to watch the postman walk past without an I7. I'm furious now. I paid extra because Amazon claimed -

ORDER THIS PRODUCT NOW TO RECIEVE IT BEFORE THE 11TH DECEMBER !

It's now the 13th.
angry.gif


What's pissing me off is I could have ordered it from Aria, OCUK, anywhere else and got courier 24 hour.

Any way the fan came.

whitefan2.jpg


whitefan1.jpg
 
Amazon decided to use the Royal Mail at this time of the year. Hence I'm currently on the phone to them after a 43 minute hold and still no CS rep has answered.

They're telling me to wait until the 20th. Sure, like I'm going to wait until then, spend an hour on the phone if I can even get through and then hope that there's any chance of it arriving before Christmas or even January.

Mongs.
 
Well price really. Blue CM fan was £8 and any other fan was at least £20 (Enermax are £25). PSU in red was as it is really.. White one was £4.99 del. Red white and blue - Britannia
biggrin.gif


Just got done waiting on the phone for 59 mins to Amamong (tm) and no answer. Called back their 0800 number and am now waiting more. Couldn't even get through to that earlier and had to call an 0207. I only get an hour free then BT start charging you so I had to hang up.

I have a feeling this is going to be a long day.....

OH GOODY !

Got through after 1.5 hours and they're using the "sorry all of our systems are down" excuse.
 
Hah I would love to think so but this is the RM after all.. Still, I am excited at least instead of having that horrible sinking feeling. I might even burn a bios flash CD in a minute
biggrin.gif
 
CPU arrived. Tried to boot from IDE to flash the bios, drive wasn't being detected. Booted into my old windows install (god I love that about 7, try that with feckin Vista) and in it went. Flashed the bios there...

PANIC.

The bios flashed OK. It rebooted with a beep, went into bios, saved, shut down.

Put in the 470. Rebooted checksum error. Into bios, set up what I could, rebooted black screen.

Cleared cmos, repeat above about ten times, started to get scared.

In the end I noticed the ram voltage was 1.7, miles off. The timings were 6 6 6 18 miles off (9 9 9 25 1.5v @ 1600).

Almost started crying from frustration and was just about to PM tom asking if he could ring me to help as I have absolutely no experience with these bioses.. In the end I found all the settings thanks to "overclock recovery" in bios that stopped it black screening and set it all from there. Also detected XMP (enabled) and the ram is 2T, now reporting 800mhz.

Time to begin a SSD secure erase and reinstall
smile.gif
 
Not really. I just disabled speedstep and now every time I boot I am greeted with a bad overclock screen. I go into bios and it keeps forcing my ram voltages up. This is pissing me off now
sad.gif


Edit. Actually just did two cold boots and it's stopped doing that now.
 
Back
Top