Is my motherboard or CPU dead?

disconnect the HD that is not the boot drive. remove all but 1stick of ram.

could mean anything. did it say anything anywhere about repairing itself?

how far can you get in safe mode?

try another SATA port on the board and another SATA cable. drive could be finished.

RAM: 2x 2GB Kingston 1333 and 1x 4GB Kingston 1333, remove the 1 x4gb. motherboards require paired ram. your ram is causing issues, the 2 x2gb is only 4gb, the 4gb single is probably only one of a pair and read only as 2gb, anyway. It causes malfunctions and might not even be counted as part of the avaiable ram.

The PCI Express x16 slot conforms to PCI Express 2.0 standard however, the EVGA Graphics card is PCI-E 3.0 16x, this could cause a slow GPU.
EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti SC+ 3GB w/Backplate
http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=03G-P4-3663-KR
Minimum of a 450 Watt power supply. (Minimum recommended power supply with +12 Volt current rating of 24 Amps.)
Two available 6-pin PCI-E power dongles. Total Power Draw : 150 Watts

The cpu is only 2.6ghz, not exactly a super fast CPU, especially for the super fast overclocked graphics card, there might be issues between it and the cpu.

Basically, you need to acquire 2 x 4gb of ram, a PCIe 3.0 motherboard, or a video card that is PCIe 2.0 standard. Backward compatibility is useless if the video card has to resort to the PCIe 2.0 standard, you might as well get a video card with the PCIe 2.0 standard as its standard.

The PSU seems more than adequate, make sure that the connectors are directly from the PSU and you are not using molex adapters. The 12v connector is 8 pin connector, make sure it is connected, it clicks into place.

Youve got 3 hdd's, 2 of which use a lower rpm, best to have those one on their own cable line, the 7200 rpm on its own cable line. They require different power requirements.

Set the bios as onboard video out, Save and exit then shut down, turn off rocker, connect the cable to vga out then remove the graphics card. Disconnect all other devices including the hard drives. If you use any external devices, remove them also. Turn on power then power up. Check you bios for power management, temps etc, check the Date/Time, and other settings, ram, timings etc. Set the onboard video out vram to its highest amount, could be 512mb. Save and Exit even if you don't make any changes. Boot to the message "you have no hard drive" or similar.

If all works well then turn off the power, then attach the devices and try to boot to SAFE MODE but using the onboard video out, not the video card.
Get to Safe Mode desktop, wait for the cursor to stop swirling then do a shut down, not a restart. After shut down, wait for about a minute then boot directly to desktop. Go to Device Manger and see if there are any errors or exclamations.

Best to disable Auto updates and select "Choose which ones to install."

what a headache some of that is............ pci-e slot means nothing. neither does that crazy talk about the ram.

OP........... you didn't have raid enabled you?

"PCI Express® 3.0 (PCIe 3.0) is the latest PCI Express bus standard with improved encoding schemes that provide twice the performance of current PCIe 2.0. Total bandwidth for a x16 link reaches a maximum of 32GB/s, double the 16GB/s of PCIe 2.0 (in x16 mode). "
Your Graphics card is only running at half its bandwidth and half its performance ratio.

"It just baffles me how overnight a pc can go from stable to NO POST" - It depends on what you were doing the night before that might be different to other times previously. You might have decided to do some video compiling which does take a lot of cpu power, or play a high FPS PC game that the video card could not abide by due to its half speed ratio of the PCIE standard.

If your free space is less than 25% then your virtual memory is at risk.
Check your device Manager for any inconsistencies.

Not many people agree with my suggestions but they are more of a last resort if nothing else works.

If your hdd's are only 3gb/s and you have them in the 6gb/s ports then that, too will impact on the performance of your hdd's. AHCI rather than IDE mode is a better option but don't go changing that option if you still got ide mode enabled, wait for instructions.

a bad board did cross my mind but don't want to go there without trying other options first.

How much free space is on your primary OS hdd?

Dust is a major factor that many people overlook, is your PC innards dust free, are the fans dust free?
Are there adequate fans for heat dispersal?
Is there congestion inside that might thwart air flow?

Your ram is most likely the major issue.
On boot POST, can you quickly see if the ram is showing what you have installed ( you need to disable Logo display to view the POST output).
Go into BIOS and see what the total ram is being accepted.
Go to your System dialog in Windows and see what the OS displays as available ram.
Run DXDIAG and see what DXDIAG has to say.

while they were hooked to your friends machine you should have done a scan disc recovery and repair........... that would have told us something. especially on the main boot drive.

have to think about this for a while.

"I'm still unable to do most of the things you're suggesting because I literally cannot acsess the bios PERIOD. The system will just freeze on the motherboard splash screen or keep loop resetting. I'm not getting ANY response when I press the 'delete' key to enter the bios. "

Considering that you can't get to POST or even into bios means that the ram is not doing its duty. Take out a stick and try with just one, or the other, or the other slot. You only need to get tobios to check the settings and the timings of the ram and the temps. Temps first, you might be surprised by how the temps can be really high on boot.

Considering temps I also had that same problem last year (Windows 7 x64, x58 motherboard), the cpu was super hot and my cooler was just a tad slow in giving proper cooling. I think the thermal paste was also low grade so when I removed the cooler, the thermal paste was dried out, I only had it put on a few months eariler.

Well, you have to have ram installed, even just one to get anything to work. Some motherboards would beep like crazy if there was no ram installed, some motherboards actually power on without any ram, just no video output. It's a crazy motherboard world.

Have you actually tried just the 2 x 2gb ram?

Have you tried onboard video out, remove the graphics card. You might need to unseat the cmos battery for it to revert to the default onboard video out. Don't take the cmos battery out for more than 10 seconds, the cmos chip relies on the little power from the battery to keep it "fresh". You need to remove the power plug from th PSU also, as it it does give a current through the mains power (when switched on).

Quick Edit -
If the cmos battery has been unseated for a long time, more than ten seconds (more likley a few hours or so) at any one time, the cmos chip might actually be corrupted and is not replaceable. This could very well be the problem.

Another Quick Edit -
disconnect all those fans.

The cooloermaster cpu might be not providing the adquate proterction, you might need to check the thermal paste, too much acts like a barrier and too little will dry up rather quickly and not offer heat transference. Also, make sure that it is properly seated on the cpu. It should not move nor rattle nor even wobble.

The other thing about the cooler, it does support your socket but not the processor, I don't know why, it just seems silly if it fits over the socket, perhaps the cpu iteslf has a raised processor edge bit that impedes the fitting of the cooler?

http://www.coolermaster-usa.com/product.php?product_id=2923

CPU Socket

Intel®:
Sandy Bridge 1155
Socket LGA 1366 / 1155 / 1156 / 775

AMD™:
Socket FM2 / FM1 / AM3+ / AM3 / AM2+ / AM2

CPU Support
Intel®:
Core™ i7 Extreme / Core™ i7 / Core™2 Extreme / Core™2 Quad / Core™2 Duo / Pentium® / Celeron®

AMD™:
Phenom™ II X4 / Phenom™ II X3 / Phenom™ X4 / Phenom™ X3 / Athlon™ X2 / Athlon™ / Sempron™


Yes, I'm grabbing at straws but considering there is very little else to ponder, it's worth looking at.