Troubleshooting a computer Build

 D’oh. I'm an idiot. I’m rebuilding an old Hackintosh into an AI workstation. I pulled the motherboard from the old Corsair case, removed the Core i5 and 16GB RAM (4x4GB Corsair Vengeance sticks), and set everything up in the CoolerMaster case. Everything lined up nicely and, especially with the extra screws I got, it was an easy, straight forward build. I was confident when I hooked up to mains power everything would Just Work™.

It didn’t. Pressed the power button and it seemed to be online: The fans were spinning, the NIC lights were dancing, the power LED was on, etc., but the connected monitor stubbornly reported it was not receiving any signal. 

Back in the day, computer cases had a cheap speaker installed, looked something like this:

Wikipedia photo of an old timey computer speaker

But, no more. Starting with what the BIOS was able to tell me seemed like the natural first step, and Amazon enables almost immediate gratification (not as immediate as popping over to the neighborhood RadioShack, alas, but that hasn’t been an option for years (and RS was a shell of its former shelf for almost a decade even at that point, but I digress)). So I spent $5 on a 3-pack of the PC Motherboard Internal Speaker BIOS Alarm Buzzer (because that was the cheapest option with overnight delivery).

Brought in a portable monitor so I could put my office workstation back together.

Hooked up the piezo buzzer. Powered the machine on. One short tone (AMI BIOS) saying everything’s copacetic. But still no signal off either the VGA or HDMI ports.

Pull all the RAM. Beep beep beep beep beep beep ... Okay, so it knows how to do error codes. Nothing left to do but to pull the CPU and swap the old Core i5 back in. Voila, 8 seconds after hitting the power button, I have the BIOS screen. Is the Xeon I got dead?

I look at the photo I took of it before I covered it in thermal paste and buried it under the cooler stack. Found the photo and zoomed in and ... It’s an E3-1270 V2 (and yeah, I absolutely should have caught that before I went through the whole build ... that’s the “D’oh!’ part...) (and yeah, that’s how it arrived, swaddled in bubble wrap, sigh):

E3-1270V2 Xeon, which is not the E3-1275V2 I ordered

The difference between the 1270 I got and the 1275 I ordered? If you said “the 12x5 Ivy Bridge Xeon CPUs include Intel HD Graphics P4000 support, the 12x0 chips do not,” you’d be correct. (The TDP is also somewhat lower.) The machine was probably working fine with the 1270 installed, but without a video card, I had no way at hand of confirming that.

(Though, side note, the Gigabyte motherboard is old enough that it still has COM / LPT headers, and I could pick up one of these dual port kits with bracket - even if identifying the ports as “DB9” grinds my gears - they’re DE9 - and use a serial port console. Linux supports that, as does the BIOS. Hmm. Probably not worth the resulting hassle for the 9W or so of power saving.)

Anyway. I’ve ordered another 1275 (and looked closely at the photo to make sure that’s what’s being sold), complained to the original eBay seller about the mis-titled, incorrectly described 1270 they sold me, and went ahead and set up Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (“Noble Numbat”) using the Core i5 for now. It’s not as big of a deal as I thought it would be to remove the CPU fan, cooler, swap the chips, etc. Just need to scrub the old thermal paste and apply new. The Thermalright Assassin X120 came with a syringe full of more than enough paste, and I still have a bottle full of ArctiClean Thermal Grease Paste Compound Remover from a GPU refresh I did like 4 years ago (?!).

It’s alive! Ubuntu installed on workstation (with i5 installed)