You really gotta laugh

So, a few nights ago my 5-day-old PC died again. I got a BSOD, I rebooted, and I faced a black screen. A serious one at that, because the monitor was still on standby. Meaning the PC was failing to complete POST.

Even more worryingly, the motherboard's diagnostic LEDs were pointing to a VGA problem. Fuck. Double fuck 'cos the VGA happened to be a 2-day-old HD7970. I removed the VGA, and attached the other HD7970: nothing. I attached the 5870: nothing.

I then remembered that SandyBridge has a built-in iGPU, so I attached the monitor to that and removed all other VGAs: nothing.

A quick google tells me that such an issue has happened before to other people with similar set ups, and it turned out to be the motherboard. I ordered a replacement, with a view to sending the faulty one back for a refund once the replacement is working.

Amazon promptly delivered the new mobo yesterday, so I thought I'd quickly breadboard it, with just a stick of RAM and CPU. Guess what: nothing! And the diagnostic LED was stuck in the same place, ie at VGA.

I can only assume that the CPU is dead. Probably what was happening is that the POST process was stalling after detecting VGA, hence the diagnostic led wasn't turning off (the motherboard doesn't have any diagnostic LEDs after VGA, so it's the last one).

Funnily enough, it's universally accepted that CPUs very rarely are the cause of a dead PC. I've now gone through trying to start the PC with 5 different GPUs, 10 different sticks of RAM (seriously), and two motherboards. Still nothing.

I remember ages ago (10 or 11 years ago) the same thing happened to me. I ended up buying a new everything including a PSU and it turned out to be the CPU. Back then when I sent it back they refused the RMA because the CPU had magically acquired bent pins (it hadn't when I sent it). I wished I'd taken a picture of it before sending. This time, there are no pins on the CPU to bend, as I know full well.

A replacement CPU is on the way.