(whats up with srf, have to relog after i do anything
)I know what you're thinking, too good to be true. Yeah, so did i. Let me take you back to this past Sunday morning, when I saw this ad on a local craigslist-like site:
I replied to it, and left my phone number and email telling the guy I wanted to see it.
He (17-18 year old) told me over the phone of this elaborate story of him and his friend building a gaming pc from components his dad bought him. First he got a bad mobo and then bent the pins on the gigabyte mobo he had for sale. He thought the i7 was broken as well as that's what the computer shop where it took after bending the mobo pins told him, and then tried to sell him a new computer. Bad news right? I went and saw it in person, where he was admittedly embarrassed but more than wanting to get rid of it. Nothing seemed immediately awry based on visual inspection, other than the bent pins. Here's what I bought for $40. A "broken" i7 920 and EX58-UD3R motherboard.
Links to images because they're huge.
http://imgur.com/pAEep.jpg
http://imgur.com/doSAW.jpg
http://imgur.com/87kt3.jpg
http://imgur.com/uyGaW.jpg
Anyways. 5 or so pins were bent on the mobo. Using a guide I found on a forum, I used a razor blade to straighten the pins in rows. A couple required a little more effort, but overall it was fairly easy.
That brings me to tonight, when I connected everything it needed to boot, and put in some DDR3 ram.
I see the post screen immediately.
Following my amazement seeing that, I connected my dvd drive and a sata harddrive I had laying around and did a quick windows install. Following that..
This is the end result.
Needless to say I'm extremely satisfied. My original thought talking to this kid on the phone was that he had no idea what he was doing, (nor did his "friend"). The fact that he took it to a computer shop, but he didnt know if they tested the CPU on another mobo or not made me confident enough that either of the components could still work and he'd have no idea. Hilariously, when I asked him casually what games he played on PC, he replied "A lot of counter strike source".
You need an i7 for cs:source? lol..
