My Fist ever Intel build.....Help needed please

Hi guys,

Well after untold years as an amd follower I finally plumped up the courage to go Intel.......well the thought of an i5 was too much to resist........and as I'm just starting it now as I type I have a problem that needs help from a regular intel builder.

Sounds kind of daft but I bought an aftermarket cooler and I'm getting myself confused with this intel cpu retention bracket thing that you pull down to clip the cpu in place.............now my question is..........do I remove that by unscewing it to fit the aftermarket cooler or am I supposed to leave it on???.

Can't see anywhere in the paperwork that says do either and the internet at large hasn't been too informative either.................would greatly appreciate some advice here :)

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Originally Posted by Dingo

Hi guys,

Well after untold years as an amd follower I finally plumped up the courage to go Intel.......well the thought of an i5 was too much to resist........and as I'm just starting it now as I type I have a problem that needs help from a regular intel builder.

Sounds kind of daft but I bought an aftermarket cooler and I'm getting myself confused with this intel cpu retention bracket thing that you pull down to clip the cpu in place.............now my question is..........do I remove that by unscewing it to fit the aftermarket cooler or am I supposed to leave it on???.

Can't see anywhere in the paperwork that says do either and the internet at large hasn't been too informative either.................would greatly appreciate some advice here :)

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NO what ever you do do not remove the cpu socket, there should be 4 holes surrounding the socket, these holes is where the after market cooler is fitted hope this helps :)

Thanks for that......did get there in the end but it was my fault for choosing such a monster cooler (Zalman cnps12) for a first build. gave up on that in the end and used an akasa vodoo which was a far simpler task :).

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Originally Posted by Dingo

Thanks for that......did get there in the end but it was my fault for choosing such a monster cooler (Zalman cnps12) for a first build. gave up on that in the end and used an akasa vodoo which was a far simpler task :).

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Pleased you got it sorted mate.

let us know what your positive and negative feedback is comparing it to your previous amd build

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Originally Posted by eagle123

let us know what your positive and negative feedback is comparing it to your previous amd build

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Well I can certainly point one of those out right away!!.

I always assemble and test out of the case first when I do any build so that I know everything is okay before it goes in the case and that way any problems I hit after that are likely to be case or cable related.

I was having a problem getting the mobo (Asrock Z77 Extreme4) to boot, finally did after I changed over psu's so I thought it was just a psu problem. Mobo booted and the onboard diagnostic tool went straight to error 55 (memory) so I tried every configuration possible and it still wouldn't get past error 55.........and of course as a first build in about seven years, and coming from a skt 939 system, I had no spare memory to test in the mobo.

Telephoned OCUK technical to discuss and was told they didn't normally have a problem with the brand of memory I had chosen so probably the mobo was at fault as they had "a lot of Asrock mobo's come back!". Dutilfully RMA'd with a view to a refund and in my impatience immediately ordered a replacement Asus with another two sticks of ram just to be sure I had some cover. Anyway it arrived with them today and within hours I had received an e-mail back telling me the mobo had bent pins and I hadn't returned it with the cpu coverplate on as they had asked and would be returned to me at my cost!!.......quite how that would have happened is beyond me because I followed the instructions to the letter when placing the cpu in the socket, and in all my time in building amd based systems not once have I ever bent any pins on cpu's.


The better news is the replacement board booted fine and into the new EUFI bios........now this is obviously not an Intel problem.......but I'm now having problems as the bios is not recognising a boot device (ie) in the manual provided the bios shows a picture of a hdd appearing to the bottom left...............nothing is appearing in my eufi bios even though the only device I have connected is an SSD drive....did try connecting media drive but that didn't show either so I gave up earlier this evening and watched Utopia instead.

Have been looking through websites to see if others have had same problem but if anyone on here knows how to resolve it that would be great :) ...............if not I might have to just go back to amd and flog this lot off :) :)

The much better news is that once I had ascertained that the drives should be connected to the 3Mbps headers it all went swimmingly well.

Which leaves me with a conundrum.....what to do with a brand new Asrock Z77 motherboard that I paid £110.00 for that has a few bent pins?.....Carvedeye, perhaps you can help here, as you have been most helpful to date??.

A few bent pins can be carefully straightened and the Mobo should be fully functional after that

Your drives need to be formatted to GPT and not MBR for the mobo to recognise them in EUFI BIOS. Easiest way is to connect the drives to another PC and format them as GPT using the Computer Management tools.

LGA pins tend to be considerably more fragile/easier to bend than PGA (and move the responsibility to the motherboard MFR rather than the CPU, but I'll avoid ranting too much), and while it's unlikely for someone to bend them while installing a CPU carefully, they're occasionally bent when you receive the motherboard. They should be fairly easy to see, holding the board up to your eyes horizontally, so you can look across the socket can help.

Did you correctly attach the coverplate? If not, it's possible the pins could have been damaged on the return journey, and might not have been the original cause of the problem.

Also, what brand of RAM did you get? It's possible to get faulty RAM from pretty much any MFR; dead RAM is unlikely to pass any testing but it can be damaged in transit, broken solder joints for example.

The BIOS should recognise disks whether they're MBR or GPT, UEFI is compatible with both. Double check cabling and, depending on the board, they might need to be formatted for the BIOS to display them in the GUI, but they should still appear under the SATA menu or elsewhere.

Thanks all......yes it could well have been a return journey blunder with the pins because as I said it was my first ever Intel build and I was unfamiliar with cover plates and such so my bad.

It would be good to repair the pins but I have hands like sides of ham so anything that requires delicacy is going to be out for me!!.

Again it was kind of odd with the new bios and windows 7.......it just did everything itself almost much unlike the XP installs I had been used to.....so I never saw anything relating to MBR or GPT it just loaded itself and gave me a working pc..........only "problem" I have now is to find where about 30Gb of hdd space has gone to as it is reporting only having 79GB available of a 120GB drive.

That's about right TBH.

First, you have to remember the quoted space of the drive implies 120,000,000,000 bytes or so. To confuse matters, the SSD will likely have 128GiB of NAND, but even 128GB drives will have some space reserved for stuff like wear-levelling/over-provisioning.

Anyway, the rest is probably being eaten by pagefile, hibernation file, system restore, and a small amount by a 100MB system partition created by the Windows installer.

If you don't use hibernation, launch an elevated command prompt and type the following to disable it and reclaim some space (equal to RAM size) after a reboot: powercfg -h off

Depending on your preferences, the other two can be disabled to regain space but I don't think a blanket argument to disable them is appropriate. Personally, I have them both disabled as I backup frequently and restore is rarely useful for me, and because I manage with with 8GB RAM and no PF; I'd rather keep unnecessary writes off my SSD but be aware it can cause problems if you manage to fill your physical memory, or with some programs (although I've not come across any).

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Originally Posted by kmac

A few bent pins can be carefully straightened and the Mobo should be fully functional after that

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+1 Thats what i would do, just use a small flat end screwdriver to try and straighten them out but be careful as they are fragile.

@OP: Did you manage to get this sorted?