A tale of woe turned yay, with a side order of thanks to ocuk 
(holy **** that was practically poetic!)
Friday afternoon, took receipt of an MSI GTX670, card seemed fine to begin with but started periodically crashing my PC to a red screen, so i started running all sorts of tests only to find nothing would solve the problem, so i decided to resort to reinstalling windows.......but FIRST i thought it would be a good idea to update my bios chip. This video explains how wrong i was about that:
Anyway, i killed my motherboard by not paying attention to what i was doing when downloading the latest bios version, my motherboard is an Asus P8P67 Rev 3, naturally Asus in all their wisdom list the P8P67 and P8P67 Rev 3 in their list of motherboards together, and give no warning or indication to any half asleep over excited idiot that they may be using the wrong one....so i used the wrong one
Luckily, i had a spare motherboard, albeit a crappy one so i got back to testing the card and came to the conclusion that it was definitely the card that was faulty and in the meanwhile ordered myself a new bios chip, but i wasn't content with waiting so i started trying to hotflash the bios with the one on the board i had spare, very very nearly got it working but sadly failed in the end and gave up (if you don't know what hot flashing is, it's the process of using two boards that use the same type of chip and replacing it while the PC is on, after it's gone past the POST screen as in theory the board only needs it to start up....was fairly worried about doing it to begin with but overall i think it went well.)
So Monday morning, contact OcUK, within an hour i've got an RMA number and posted the card off later in the day. The next day i get notification that they've recieved it.....now from this point i thought it would be about a week before i received my new card, but fast forward to right now and it's sat beside me
The most insanely quick RMA turn around i've ever had!!
So some good luck at last! but that's not all, yesterday afternoon when i got home from work i found my new bios chip had arrived, and it works!
Went from the ****est weekend I've had in a long time where nothing would go right and everything i touched was breaking (honestly surprised i didn't brick both motherboards when hotflashing) to some good luck and the greatest customer service any company has ever displayed to me!
TL;DR: Bad stuff happened, then some good stuff happaned, ocuk mainly to thank for the good stuff.
So thanks OcUK! (and the bios repair company that i can't name as they 'might' be considered a competitor as they sell some small components) Looking forward to getting home and playing with my new, hopefully working this time, toy!
(holy **** that was practically poetic!)Friday afternoon, took receipt of an MSI GTX670, card seemed fine to begin with but started periodically crashing my PC to a red screen, so i started running all sorts of tests only to find nothing would solve the problem, so i decided to resort to reinstalling windows.......but FIRST i thought it would be a good idea to update my bios chip. This video explains how wrong i was about that:
Anyway, i killed my motherboard by not paying attention to what i was doing when downloading the latest bios version, my motherboard is an Asus P8P67 Rev 3, naturally Asus in all their wisdom list the P8P67 and P8P67 Rev 3 in their list of motherboards together, and give no warning or indication to any half asleep over excited idiot that they may be using the wrong one....so i used the wrong one
Luckily, i had a spare motherboard, albeit a crappy one so i got back to testing the card and came to the conclusion that it was definitely the card that was faulty and in the meanwhile ordered myself a new bios chip, but i wasn't content with waiting so i started trying to hotflash the bios with the one on the board i had spare, very very nearly got it working but sadly failed in the end and gave up (if you don't know what hot flashing is, it's the process of using two boards that use the same type of chip and replacing it while the PC is on, after it's gone past the POST screen as in theory the board only needs it to start up....was fairly worried about doing it to begin with but overall i think it went well.)
So Monday morning, contact OcUK, within an hour i've got an RMA number and posted the card off later in the day. The next day i get notification that they've recieved it.....now from this point i thought it would be about a week before i received my new card, but fast forward to right now and it's sat beside me
The most insanely quick RMA turn around i've ever had!! So some good luck at last! but that's not all, yesterday afternoon when i got home from work i found my new bios chip had arrived, and it works!
Went from the ****est weekend I've had in a long time where nothing would go right and everything i touched was breaking (honestly surprised i didn't brick both motherboards when hotflashing) to some good luck and the greatest customer service any company has ever displayed to me!
TL;DR: Bad stuff happened, then some good stuff happaned, ocuk mainly to thank for the good stuff.
So thanks OcUK! (and the bios repair company that i can't name as they 'might' be considered a competitor as they sell some small components) Looking forward to getting home and playing with my new, hopefully working this time, toy!
