So the second new motherboard is in for the media PC. I installed it hoping that everything would just magically work because surely the second time around nothing could go wrong. Boy was I wrong again. This time though there was no immediately obvious reason why. The board installed fine and looks fine. All of the parts installed correctly but the damn thing produces no video;  either through the video card of have for it nor through the on board chip. I removed all the relevant parts except for what’s necessary and still no video. Swapped out memory modules and still no memory.

So … I ordered another processor to try and see if the first new motherboard fried the original processor. Hopefully this will be it and I can begin the process of shipping off the various parts I have that need to be RMA’d.