Business PCs, Workstations and Point of Sale Systems

Dear Forum,

I might have messed up big time. Let me just give you a short walk through of my problem.

Until yesterday I had a Z440 system with a Xeon E5 1620 V3 CPU, 64 GB of RAM (6 banks filled, no RAM cooling kit, that just came in the post this morning) and a Windows 10 system. There never was a Bios Update done on the system, so no Info there on the BIOS version (read on why)

And yes, now I know that I should have upgraded to a new BIOS before upgrading to a new CPU, so please don´t bash me there as I´ve suffered the consequences (read on).

Yesterday I upgraded to a E5 1680 v3 CPU. No problem there, removed the cooler, cleaned the paste off, applied new CPU and cooling paste. After booting up, the machine showed me a Post error of 973 - DRAM corruption.

So I removed all RAM blocks except for one, rebooted, got the 973 error again, entered BIOS and checked the system. CPU test and RAM quick test passed. So I had the BIOS do a component test and went home.

This morning I got back and the Test got stuck, so I rebooted the system. Could load up BIOS, selected System diagnostics...black screen and reboot...Now the system wouldn´t even boot up to the BIOS, but reboot every few seconds.

So then I switched the BBR jumper to the the two pins pointing to the back of the workstation, prepared a USB stick on another machine with HPBiosupdrec.exe (v 2.48) , applied the USB stick to the workstation rebooted and...it didnt work, it beeped 8 times, and after 30 seconds or so the cpu cooler would get real loud. After 10 minutes I rebooted the system and tried again..nothing. Curently its been running for 30 minutes with the coolers very loud and no response, just a black screen.

Did I brick the motherboard with my behaviour? What are the neccessary next steps to get a ne BIOS up and running? Clearing the CMOS would be my next bet.

Currently I´ve lost a bit of hope and am open to any suggestions.

Best regards

Chris