Just wanted to share my successes and failuers in assembling my new pc last night. I have the following:
P4 2.4B (retail)
P4S8X (retail)
512MB Corsair DDR333 CL2
Antec 430W 1080AMG
Radeon 9700 Pro (retail)
Western Digital 120GB SE
Lite-On 16x DVD-ROM
Floppy
First let me mention how inadiquite my documentation was (especially the case and CPU). The Asus documentation was ok but needs to be reorganized. Antec needs to spend a little more to help with the frontside connectors and panel pins. I would like to know which wire is the ground instead of guessing. The intel documentation was completly inadiquite as you will see if you read on.
I think I got lucky on a few things and at least I got the power connections right. However, my main grief last night was installing the CPU.
After I assembed everything, I ran my first test. I started up with only the CPU, memory, and video card (barebones). I noticed I had the new 1003a bios installed out of the box so I was glad for that. However after a few moments, the system shut itself down. I waited for a moment, checked my connections and started again. Same thing. I got the single beep and the POST but after a few moments (like 30-60 seconds), everything shuts down. I've heard a lot of people having problems like this so at first I was worried that one of my components was bad. For whatever reason, I decided to start my troubleshooting by checking the cpu temp in the bios. I had to act fast as the shut downs were occurring faster. Turns out the CPU temperature increased rapidly (up to 97 degrees C) before the system would shut down. I had done everything the documentation *didn't* tell me to do. The only thing those pictures from the Intel documentation didn't tell me is that I had the levers pointing in the wrong directions. In other words, I tried to snap them down but encountered resistance so I left them. Turns out I had to flip the levers to the opposite side until they clicked. To bad the documentation didn't help me here.
I restarted and went back into the bios to check temperatures. Sure enough I had failed to install the CPU heatsink and fan correctly. Everything is running fine now. I have yet to install any updates so I just wanted ya all to know that I got my system up and running out of the box without the need to flash the bios or even return my video card. Good news as I am relieved that I won't have to deal with RMA and customer service. Can't wait to finish installing goodies tonight.
Thank goodness for ASUS CPU overheat protection. And thanks for the support given in this forum.