After managing to kill my old MSI board with a bad flash, I thought it was time to upgrade to an Athlon 64, so I bought some stuff and put them together.
Hardware used:
Athlon 64 3000+
ASUS K8V (non-deluxe)
Viking 512MB DDR PC2100 (266MHz)
Chieftec chassi with the PSU that came with it, 340W thingie
3 Seagate HDDs, sizes 60, 120, 160GB
Radeon 9600 Pro
I decided only to upgrade the motherboard and CPU for now, reusing my old board's memory modules, since I'm a poor little student, and I figured I could upgrade the memory later, when I had the spare cash.
After plugging things together, I booted up the machine and went to the BIOS, put the memory setting to "4:3 DDR266" and a friend told me Turbo mode was spiffy, so use that, and auto on the CPU and whatever. The hardware monitor said the CPU was at 50C, so we turned off the machine and reinstalled the cooler (Zalman 7000B AlCu), this time without the black plastic crap in the way. Turned on the machine again after making sure the cooler was stable, and while monitoring the BIOS Hardware Monitor for to see if the temperature of the CPU was alright (32-33 degrees), the most delightful thing happened:
THE FUDGING MEMORY MODULE CAUGHT FIRE!
I noticed a curious orange glow from the RAM slots, and then I saw a bunch of smoke coming off the DDR-DIMM module, so I shut the computer off as fast as I could, then unplugged the module and checked it out. Very interesting black hole next to the tiny chip at the lower edge of the module, a burn crater so to speak.
I took the motherboard back to the store, and they informed me that "RAM doesn't catch fire" and "that won't be replaced under warranty" and whatever, but I asked them to at least run a failcheck on the goddamn board, in case it was eager to burn another few memory sticks if I were to try again.
Now why the hell did this happen? That stick of memory worked just fine on my old MSI KT7266 Pro2 for about two months before this happened. Brand's called "Viking" and shouldn't be easily flammable.
I'm not exactly impressed with my first encounter with an ASUS product, and after reading this thread, my hopes aren't particularly high for a problemfree future with this stupid card.