Grrrr, just thought I post this here to get out my feelings of moronness.
First off, I'm a paid technician. I work on computers for a living, and have been for about 3 years. I'm A+ certified. Generally, I know my hardware.
I replace quite a few motherboards, probably in the area of 20+ per month. Now, of course, when I replace a motherboard I swap the CPU/heatsink between the two. Pretty simple thing and I can't think of a single time where I've messed that procedure up. Until now...
I bought a new Antec case 2 days ago, pretty sweet case with a good power supply as well. Of course the first thing I wanted to do when I got it home was swap my stuff from my old case (reverted back to it's original Gateway self) to my new case. Working the way I normally do, I stripped everything off the mobo, put it aside, then took the board out. So far so good. Next I put the board into the new case, put the CPU in and proceeded to put the heatsink (a Volcano 7) on. Here's where it get's ugly...
While pushing the clip down my screwdriver slips out of the little clip notch and makes its way down about 3 inches of the motherboard knocking off little transitors and such in it's wake of destruction. I decided "OK, that's not good. I'll just hope that was for something un-important like the onboard sound" and continued putting everything together. Plug it all in, power it up, and NOTHING!!!
I'm pretty sure in my first time slip of the screwdriver, messing up $100 worth of board from my own pocket, I screwed up something for the northbridge.
Anyway, the next day I ran out and bought a new boards. Just a super crappy super cheap ($89.95) "Elite Group" motherboard. I put it in, get the basics on it, and power it up. YAY! I get life! So I go ahead and put everything else on, boot it up again, jump into BIOS and bump the FSB up to the 133 MHz it's supposed to be at, power down, and begin to prepare for a format/install using my other system. I get done with the drive prep, turn on the computer, and nothing... just the video BIOS staring back at me... to make an even longer story short, this board WILL NOT boot at 133 MHz, no matter what I do. I take it back to the shop, not even he can get it to work. He pulls down another of the same board, still nothing.
I say "fack it, give me the ASUS". Now, $250 later, I once again have a working system...