Cooked CPU

At the very least, it's allowed me to check out something I was wondering about. It had been so long since I'd applied thermal paste, I wasn't sure if I had calculated the dose correctly, let alone set the heat-sink carefully enough to ensure even spreading. Apparently I had nothing to worry about there.

I suspect the Asus Rampage III Extreme motherboard killed the CPU. Just prior, it had started booting occasionally with a complaint about overclocking not working, which is utter crap because I'm not using any of the overclocking features. This started after activating the certain power saving features (in particular ErP/EuP which cuts down standby power usage). I suspect the BIOS has a bug (or it's a flaw in the hardware design) which screws up the settings while in a low power standby.

Typical of Asus, they were unwilling to help. Firstly, they refused to treat my case in English because I purchased the motherboard in Belgium, demanding I write to them in French (I can't explain this stuff in French), so I had to lie to them about being in the UK to get them to speak English, and their geniuses told me it was because my SSD had failed, and were insisting this to be the case even after I told them the motherboard wouldn't even POST!

Afterwards they told me that I needed to install new drivers to support the CPU in Windows 7.

Asus employ idiots, but honestly I didn't expect anything else from them.

Intel on the other hand were great. I was passed up the chain to a more technical guy really quickly, and allowed to explain my issue and results of my diagnostics completely. They took all my details and came to the same conclusion, cross-shipped me a new i7-980X, and said they would get in touch with Asus to iron out the compatibility issues if they could.

Wow.

I wish more companies would realise that not all of their customers are blithering idiots.

Everything's back to normal now. Thanks Intel!