As you can see in my sig, I RMA'ed a Biostar iDeq twice...currently am in the middle of my second. I would put this post in Tech Support but I would like to hear the thoughts of the people who frequent the mobo board, especially...

It's a bit of a story on what happened, but please bear with me. I just want to make sure my thinking makes sense in terms of troubleshooting so when I get a new iDeq, if it still isn't working, then I can go from there...

Anyways, I got my first iDeq (it's a small form factor system akin to a Shuttle) and set it up. It worked fantastically for three weeks and then the CPU fan header failed. Furthermore, I got a quite noticeable decrease in gaming performance. I assumed the performance issue was the result of my R9800 throttling. However, once I got my second one, the same performance issue was there! Now, it seems to me that it's either the CPU, RAM, or mobo that was dead. I had stored both the RAM and CPU as best I could since I'm at college. For the RAM that was in a good bunch of bubble wrap stowed inside a tool chest and my CPU was wrapped similarily.

So, I don't think that I nuked both parts with static or some such thing. Neither part has any appearance of problems (I.E. no bent pins on the CPU, as if appearance helps ). Presumably, that would leave the motherboard. The performance issues I talk of were incredibly weak memory bandwidth (1700 MB/s in dual channel mode on an i865G! by SANDRA) and CPU scores (3000-some in the SANDRA ALU part of the arithmetic test). Furthermore, 3D Mark 2001 was at 7100 instead of 15000.

So, think I did the right thing? Or should I start RMA'ing other stuff...