well that confused me i must be tired maybe i should go to bed early for once lol. i might look more into that later once ive read it once or twice i will get my head around it and i will tell you what i think

Windows XP does not like bad RAM when it's installing.

From the sounds of it, you may have recieved a slightly faulty motherboard, but before RMing that, try different memory.

@Garhar, thanks bud good call.

@Daizigy, I think Garhar has the right idea, if you can, test with some "spare/borrowed" memory first. The problem really does point at the board being faulty, keep us posted.

Could be your power supply...but that's doubtful

It could be the motherboard again, or even the fact that the cpu isn't supported on that motherboard..have you checked the manufacturers website for compatability issues?

Another faulty mobo would be kindof a bugger but it looks more like the ram than anything right now I think and your ram and CPU seem to be the only things you haven't swapped out yet, I'd try the ram first as it's generally most likely to ship faulty.

What's the wattage on your power supply, I'd imagine you wouldn't want to be running such a beast of a machine with anything less than a 420 Watt and that might be cutting it close.

Well I made some progress today, I increased the memory voltage from 1.8V to 2.1V and now the system will POST with the ram in the first DIMM slot.

But I let a friend borrow my windows xp cd so i cant try to install windows yet...

lol and double_a_ron i never thought of my system as a "beast"... I remember when a 300 Watt PSU was more than enough. But I am using a XION 400 power supply.