Disaster. NOW.

While I was writing this blog post yesterday I had no idea how accurate picture I chosen to adorn it. I had absolutely no idea that I was actually playing a game with fate and obviously he hit me badly today.

So thanks to ASUS I got my replacement mainboard delivered today. I gave it a couple of hours to get used to conditions inside my flat given it most likely spend last few days in a cold warehouses or trucks. Here we go! Disassembly was quite fast but I've noticed something interesting - my heatsink didn't seem to be in proper contact with CPU. Then I just started to think what if the heatsink is too heavy and it pushes the cpu so hard that it does not have proper contact with pins on upper side? Sounds crapy. 

Nevertheless; I assembled everything back again. Just to be on the safe side - I put discoverer on side just to make sure that heatsink is unable to make any unbalanced pressure on CPU. Held my breath, power-on. It's b7 again. Damn it...

Looks like there is some serious issue around, but who to blame? Second motherboard same fault? Not really much possible from the probability point of view. So I decided to completely remove heatsink from the CPU itself. Well, it may be a little bit risky but it shouldn't burn in flames after a minute and I'll make sure that it's not heatsink fault. Okay, power-on... b7. Its beginning to be ridiculous. CPU fail? Is that really possible? Time to change CPU. Being proactive, I equipped myself with additional E5-2630L-v2. Power-On... b7 again. What's wrong with that stuff?

Having all this experience I decided to get in touch w/ASUS support again. It's more likely to have two broken motherboards than two broken CPUs. It was easy to replace the mainboard (but anyway I'm grateful for ASUS to be such a professionals and I'm impressed by the way they handled it). Are we gonna start blame game now? Let's see what's ASUS support is made from. My best guess? Both MBs are good, there may be some issue with support for E5v2 CPUs, hopefully to be corrected by BIOS update. Oh, by the way I've just taken this little screenshoot from ASUS Web page. :-)