Please help First Build

[Ryan_90]

So I have invested ~650 dollars in my very first pc build and so far it has turned from exciting in to too much problems for me to deal with. First I will say micro center was out of my first choice of mobo AND my back up choice (gigabyte z97mx gaming 5 and msi pc mate) so I had to go with, what i thought, was the next best thing: an Asrock z97 pro4. I would not recommend this board to ANYONE as it has cause me so much headache and workaround already with its integrated UEFI bios system.

Let me start at the beginning: During my fresh install of windows 7 64bit home I could not get a burnt DVD that my friend swears he built his PC from to work on my optical drive. So that being said I dl-ed a fresh iso and slapped it on a USB stick and it booted and at the very end of the installation I recieved an error message "Your computer has restarted unexpectedly and the installation could not finish. Please restart your computer and restart the installation process." or something to that effect. Well I found a way to edit the system registry online and go into the ChildProtection folder (I believe is what it was called) and changed the setup.exe value from 1 to 3. And voila it bypassed the error and upon loading windows I recieved a message "Windows has recovered from an unexpected crash" or something but in fact it was the first time I had run windows... I say that because I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the problems I'm encountering now which are:

1. My motherboard is no longer sensing my optical drive, neither is windows. It was working earlier today though... restarting and such have not worked.

2. My motherboard has yet to detect my graphics card correctly which is a Gigabyte r9 380 G1 gaming 4GB edition. It comes up as the PCIe 3.0 slot is occupied but it says it is a standard VGA adapter and HD audio underneath that in the motherboard system layout and in Windows it just says VGA adapter...

Sooooo, I decided getting some new drivers may help because neither my mobo nor my GPU came with any installation software dvd's (not that I could run them anyway since my optical drive isn't showing up) so I purchased a wireless adapter USB stick instead of driving all the way out to microcenter again to buy the chip there. BUT I can't install the drivers because my optical drive is not showing up so I can't get the internet (no access to ethernet I have to use wireless) Someone suggested a reset button and changing the graphics option on my mobo to PCIe but guess what this lovely piece of metal has neither and if it does I missed anything about it when i scoured over the manual and the internet. (yes I have inspected the board visually too) I've gone through the UEFI(bios) can't find anything there either... it does have a clear CMOS function but came with no jumper..... ugghh someone PLEASE help me!!



System Specs:
Corsair Graphite 230T
Sandisk SSD
iHas optical drive
Asrock z97 pro4
Gigabyte r9 380 G1 gaming 4gb
Intel Pentium G3258

Note: also my CPU shows up twice in the windows device manager as well as my audio.

 

[Guest]

Maybe your mobo is defective?

 

[Ryan_90]

Are you suggesting I return it to microcenter? And are these signs of a defective motherboard? Like I said this is my first build so I'm not really sure what the problem is but when I finished building the PC and I powered up the first time it went straight to a "Change boot device or insert boot media into the current drive and press any key" screen. I had to force my way into the bios (spam delete) at first but with the USB stick it seemed to automatically do everything. I'm just wondering do other first time PC builders go through all this? Is this user error or is my mobo really defective? With me being inexperienced I assumed it was just my fault but maybe the mobo is defective.....

 

[Guest]

At microcenter they would check it, so you would be sure if it's mobo or something else. It sucks when your first build is so problematic. It makes you run away from PC building. I had the same experience.

 

[RARRAF]

so you have listed components except for your PSU what are you using

 

[Ryan_90]

Yeah Ive been so excited to get this thing running and actually achieve the rewarding experience of building it myself but I'm so on the verge of just getting rid of everything its got me really disappointed... There goes my whole xmas

 

[Ryan_90]

Oh EVGA 500w bronze PSU and Gskill RAM (2x4)1600 native but I changed the frequency to 1333 because thats all the pentium supports I believe.

 

[RARRAF]

that is a good PSU but a little under-powered for the R9 380 I do believe not sure but http://www.realhardtechx.com/index_archivos/Page362.htm

 

[Ryan_90]

Hey RARRAF thanks for your reply, I followed your link plugged in my system specs and it calculated 387w usage and recommended a 430w power supply so I doubt that is the issue here. Any other ideas? I'm desperate here. =/

 

[Ryan_90]

So nobody knows anything about this issue?

 

[Ryan_90]

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