How Did We Get Here?
That part was easy. I bought a Z97 motherboard based on suggestions from my YouTube channel. Then it got complicated. The board failed almost immediately.
I tried a number of things to save it, but to no avail. It wasn’t the seller’s fault, and in their defense, it worked when I got it, for about an hour. Then it gave up, completely. If you are curious about that experiment, the video is here, and the blog is here.
My second attempt included buying an untested MSI Z97 and giving that a shot. I could see in the pictures it had a few bent pins, so I knew it didn’t work, but forty bucks was a good price to risk a fix. Getting the board, II discovered more bent pins. It turned riskier with that discovery.
Did it Work?
An hour later I had all pins but one in place, and it was ready to test. That one pin broke, and it would make or break the whole effort. My hope was that was for ground or for future use, but if it were a memory controller or something, then it’s bad.
A series of boot loops, a BIOS reset, and reseating memory, and it booted. Success, sort of. That was only part of the challenge, I still didn’t know if it actually functioned. I updated the BIOS, added more memory and installed an OS, and it still worked. Now I was feeling better.
The last thing was to stress the CPU. I was using an i5 4430 to test, and downloaded Cinebench 2026. And, although the 693 score is not groundbreaking, it was a valid test and I could breathe again. I had a platform and a baseline and I could do some more aggressive testing with a more powerful CPU. Mission accomplished.
Wait? That’s it?
Of course not.
First, I did see bent pins in the pictures from the seller and knew what to expect, but my first attempt failed because there were pins I didn’t see that were bent. It wasn’t until I ran my finger over the pins for an idea of top alignment, that I found problem areas. A closer examination showed other bent pins. One of which snapped off instead of bending back into place.
Whether it’s for ground or future use, I don’t know, but all four memory slots worked and the CPU didn’t show timing issues, so I now have an LGA 1149 socket that seems to work. We’ll see if that holds with the XEON CPU.
My other nitpick is with Maxon. A lot of people still use Cinebench R20, or R23, and they have made it incredibly difficult to find on their site. R20 is a much more appropriate test with older hardware, even without full support. I need to bring back ‘Shady’ or Brilliant’ in one of my videos. This is definitely Shady.
Other than that, this worked great and I’m happy. Next will be tests with the 4670, the Xeon 1270v3 and eventually, it may be my NAS server. I only have one case that fits an excess number of HDDs, but a recent purchase may help. It’s not a case, it’s a hard drive cage. Now if I can only find a case to put it in.
The video for this adventure is here.