[addaon]

Whenever I see a post like this, I wonder why the poster didn't just return the non-working part to the vendor they bought it from. This might be my US bias, but very few vendors put it on the customer to prove a certain level of testing and diagnostic activities; if the customer says it didn't work, the customer gets their money back. If you're not sure if it's the motherboard or the CPU or... return it all, and try again. No?

[cuddlyogre]

I may have been able to return it to Newegg, but return shipping is hit or miss as to whether you have to pay for it and I was honestly so frustrated with the whole fiasco that I just wanted to go directly to the source for a replacement that I knew(??) would work. Getting a replacement from Newegg might have just been another from the same lot.

As for having to prove I did ample troubleshooting, the last thing I wanted was to mail it in and have it returned because they couldn't find anything wrong with it, which has happened to me with other things in the past.