This past week and my frustrating computer build.
It started out with last Friday when my main media computer restarted and would no longer boot. I spend the next half hour tracing the problem to the 6 month old Gigabyte AM3+ motherboard. It would not post. I then calmly informed Ellen that I had to spend the rest of the evening reconfiguring the remaining 2 Desktops so that all 16 GB of Media could be accessed from both the Basement and our bedroom. I spent the next 5 hours doing just that. I put the 6 core AM3 processor in the known compatible AM2+ board (I had originally bought that processor last summer and spent some time figuring out how to make it work on that board, but with a bios update and changing a simple setting that allowed AM3 Processors to work in the AM2+ socket, it worked rather well until I could get an AM3 board and DDR3 RAM to allow us to have two systems that could play HD 1080p media smoothly). I then moved the Quad core processor to my office desktop's AM2 Board and evened out the RAM between the two so that they could both function adequately. Throughout the week, I continued selling stuff on eBay with the sole purpose of obtaining a new board. I finally got enough for one on Wednesday and made the mistake of getting the Asrock 870 R2.0 board. If I had had the patience to wait another day, I could have afforded something better. I like Asrock, but this board was infuriating to install on. I made a few mistakes myself like attempting to install Windows 7 from an optical drive that was hooked up through a Raid card. That was dumb and I admit it, however I found that the system will not boot properly with a raid card installed. This means that I can only use 5 Sata ports. So I had to move 4 additional hard drives to my bedroom system and I have the ports on the new board all filled up as well. I sent my old Gigabyte board in for warranty service. I am really hoping that they can replace it for me so that I can put things back the way they were. If they do it quickly enough, I might be sending this board back to newegg unless I decide to keep it as a backup or to put it toward building a better system for the bedroom. It should not take that much effort to install Windows on a system and get it working. Not to mention that I had to search Google for the Bios update because Asrock's site does not even list this board. It seems stable for now, but my Gigabyte board had 8 Sata ports and was able to support the Raid cards for additional ports with no issues at all. The verdict is that this board is just garbage. It would barely allow me to get into the bios before I removed the Raid card. The only reason I settled on that board was because I have two raid cards and should have been able to add 4 more drives using them.