So last weekend I finally got myself set up again, but there was definitely some headaches.
First, my second motherboard I got was also bad. Well I'm pretty sure of it too. I tested it out with my brother's components and we got it down to the only thing consistent with both failures was the motherboard. It was the same model from the same store. I kind of felt defeated after spending so much time with this. I had rebuilt the OS on my old motherboard/CPU and got that stable, was upset I lost my 5TB hard drive and data. I just told myself, fuck it, I'll upgrade at a later date because I'm extremely frustrated and I just want to get on with my life and not spend hours troubleshooting the $500 of garbage I was buying. So the one thing I wanted to keep was my new heatsink and decided to put it on my old motherboard since I had heating issues with that CPU, apparently my old heatsink fan was not performing well. Well after doing this, my CPU completely failed. I think my old heatsink was just right for keeping it working and removing it exposed something. I don't know, I know there was like no thermal paste on it when I took off the heatsink and what was left was a white coat of goo along the edges which I think was actually doing just enough to keep it from failing. I don't know, just a guess. But I could not get that CPU to power on again. It would heat up insanely hot the moment I put power to it. I was defeated again.
I went back to the store to return everything. I don't think all was bad, just the motherboard, but I wanted none of it. I then purchased a completely different product. The last gen cpu, Core I7-6700k, a previous gen motherboard (but a much better one) Asus Maximus Hero 8, and then some ram (EVGA was the ones on sale, 16GB at I forget the speed, but overclocked speed) and a Samsung M.2 250GB SSD.
This worked. Well mostly. But the motherboard worked. I am back in business. I do have one issue, Windows is unable to detect my M.2 SSD. So I wasn't able to install Windows 7 on it. I looked into it briefly and some say Windows 7 has issues with them. I need to look further into it, because I want to be able to use it, but I might have to upgrade to Windows 10. Either way, I am back to gaming and should be making videos soon again. Also, I brought back to life my old 2TB hard drive which has all my backed up info from 2016 and before, so at this point I've only lost my data from this year. That sucks, but not as bad as losing it all. I am going to be looking into getting 2x 3TB and creating a raid1 array for my data on that. Put this 2TB back into storage, and maybe find another hard drive for my "active data" I guess you can call it (aka video files for editting). My raid0 array of 2x 400GB SSDs isn't big enough for my games plus my active data and I'd rather not have that data run on my slow storage drives.