Sometimes you just have to ask "Why me?".

I've put a lot of time and money into my PC, but it really has caused me nothing but trouble.

A rocky start when the retailer turned the normally simple task of payment into a battle to the death, weeks later the motherboard deciding to pull more power than it needs and having to return it under warranty and buy a secondary motherboard (which later turned itself into a lovely HTPC), etc.

Lately I had been noticing a serious lack of power for a machine that is supposed to be high-end, the backup machine I am currently using had easily been outpacing it. And yesterday when I rebooted it it just decided that it had had enough, no more would it boot, no more would it even pass the "Verifying DMI Pool" message.

I looked into this issue via the incessant puss that is Google and found some generic causes of this issue that I will hopefully look into more tomorrow, but I fear that this motherboard is at its best trying to drive me insane. Obviously I don't want to fork out more money on a machine that has consumed so much so far but I would be willing to do so if it where to guarantee that the machine would live a long healthy life for at least another year or two.

Maybe I should have bought a pre-made system in the first place, but I fail to believe that this is the case as my HTPC which I also put months of planning into has never failed me yet.