Help, please.

Lately I've purchased an AZZA 366A-AV, an Athlon XP 1700+, 256 MB of elixir PC2100 DDR RAM, and a Radeon 8500 Retail. After putting it all together, I press the power switch to turn it on, but the CPU fan only spins for a fraction of a second and then nothing happens at all, no power or anything. I've taken the CPU out, and then the power will stay on, but of course it doesn't post. What do you think the problem is?

Yes! Actually, I fully attached the heat sink and it finally booted up (that never used to be important!). It still didn't post, but then I hooked up an old Thunderbird 800 and it booted up fine. So, either the 1700+ CPU is screwed up, or I don't have some setting right on the motherboard. In terms of the CPU being messed up, I noticed many fingerprints and much thermal compound residue on the ceramic covering on the top of the chip. Could any of that be a problem, and is there a way to wash it off without damaging the chip? I'm also going to try to fool around with the voltage now and see if I get anywhere with that.

My buddy was planning on building a system but has had similiar trouble. He had a Soyo Daragon + with a 1.4 ghz Athlon and was getting hung up in POST. The CPU and Ram would show but then the board would lock up. Soyo said it was a bad board and gave him a return # for the vendor to accept his board back. The vendor suggested he buy a second board and return the first.(so he could get it faster) He did that, got the new mobo and installed it, same problem. This time he saw a piece blow off the board by where the RAM is located. (Im not sure what it looked like because all that was left was a little 'u' shape piece half attached to the board. Upon closer inspection of the first board, he noticed the same piece burned off in the same way. To add insult to injury, his processor now won't fire up in his old pc, it looks like it might be toast. I think it might be the power supply, it was the Antec SX830 case, we never were able to test it though because he returned it to where he bought it. I laughed to myself last week when I was watching The Screen Savers on Tech TV when they were going to build an Athlon system on tv, but couldn't because the power supply and mobo toasted when they tried it before the show. It was an Antec case...
And I always like Antec...