get your snacks everyone this is going to be a fairly long story.
The beginning
my system began to take shape in the summer of 2012. i had begun to get into pc tech in the winter/fall of 2011 and learned a lot from watching linustechtips video's and started saving up money for parts. the list had started off with a fairly popular case. the cooler master HAF X. i had seen this case in a video about battlefield 3 and instantly fell in love with it. the next and most crucial choices where easy to make with the 3770k and GTX670 coming out early in the summer. with those out of the way the motherboard choice was a bit more complicated. i ended up with the Asrock z77 fata1ty professional motherboard. 4x4gb 1866 corsair vengeance memory, corsair h100, and a corsair gs700 finished off the build. after being fully assembled i did i light overclock of 4.2Ghz on my cpu since i didn't really know what i was doing and left my 670 as is.
Trouble on the horizon
this worked great for me until i realized that oops... there was a leak in my h100. i had happily driven the screws into my rad assuming that there was a plate under the screw hole to prevent penetration. after all why would they give you such long screws and not have a plate there to stop it? luckily it was such a tiny leak that i could ignore it until i had enough money to replace it. after all it was barley noticeable on the fans. if i hadn't been cleaning my case i never would have spotted it. but sadly that wasn't the worse of my troubles.
Venomous Lightning
shortly after finally getting an ssd in my system in early 2013 a power surge completely took out my system. me, my tech savvy friend and my dad who has been in tech for 20+ years all went about diagnosing the system and reached a sobering conclusion. the motherboard,CPU, and power supply where all found to be dead. it lived up to its original name "Red Venom", the sting and death from venomous lightning, and of course there is ultimate irony of the motherboard being named Fatal1ty.
Reconstruction
so with a heavy heart i managed to get enough money to order a new h100i cooler, asus maximus formula v motherboard and yet another 3770k. after a 2 week wait and some testing my rig had been rebuilt. not wanting any more complications i was extremely careful mounting my h100i. also we had a few spare power supplies around the house from other projects. as for the cpu i gave it to my friend to see if he could test it more some time. if not i was going to have it de-lidded, the ihs cut diagonally in half and mounted in a fame. a neat cutaway of a cpu die. after he left and the system was back up and running it worked well for me. aside from the annoyance of having to reload my system 3 different times in 2015 for a multitude of reasons. my system had been reborn and i was content to keep it that way for the next 2 years.
No overclocking? outrageous!
that is until around this time last year i got fed up with not being able to overclock and pursued an answer. after about 2 weeks of experimentation and physically replacing the bios 2 times nothing had changed and to this day i do not know the cause of this issue. you can find a few posts i put up discussing this issue in my post history.
The surprise
skip ahead to this new years. as any techy knows, sometimes you just have an itch to build. after getting my old cpu back from my friend and digging up my old asrock motherboard i made a shocking discovery. not only was the motherboard not dead as thought, but the cpu was perfectly fine as well! it turns out the power supply had taken the bulk of the hit and died as a result saving the rest of the system and also having it appear to have killed the motherboard and cpu. once i got past the shock that for 3 years i had assumed this hardware was dead and bought replacements for no reason, i got it set up as a test bench. luckily enough i even had a spare 120mm aio cooler to keep the cpu properly cooled.
The testing
for 2 weeks i steadily pushed the overclock and hammered it day and night stress testing the cpu to it's limits. the testing consisted of daily cinebench r15 runs, aida 64 2-4 hour burns. just for fun set it up to do some sheep-it renders as a real world workload test. at the end of the testing i had pushed the once thought dead cpu to 4.6Ghz at a low 1.256 volts! of course i flirted with hitting 4.7Ghz but i didn't want to push my luck and was already itching to get the strong 4.6Ghz overclocked CPU back in my case.
The rebuild and revenge
with me happy with the overclock i quickly swapped the asus board out of my system an got the original motherboard and cpu back in. the rebuilt system was renamed "RedVenom's Revenge". this has worked flawlessly for me and i was perfectly happy and content with this impressive feat. but in the back of my mind i knew i could take the overclock that little bit further. plus noticing the trend of 7's in my system may have contributed to the idea of getting a 4.7Ghz overclock.
4.6Ghz isn't enough
so today i pushed the already beastly cpu overclock to it's highest point yet. it is now happy and stably running 4.7Ghz at only 1.286 volts. i honestly couldn't be more proud of this system and impressed with the durability these parts have. there is no real point to this post but i felt i had to share the remarkable story of my system with you all.
Lessons learned
if there is a lesson to learn from all of this i can think of only two. first off always use a battery backup/surge protector. two, when diagnosing a problem. never assume anything. test every component even if your certain nothing is wrong with it.
i thank you all for taking the time to read this post. i hope you enjoyed. also if you have any stories of part resurrection like this i would love to read it.
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