Sorry for the double post....
Anyways, good news good news... the CPU was not fried... *phew*... it turned out to be the least I expected.... the RAM...
Apparently, I didn't put one of the RAM sticks in right, and when I took off the RAM, I saw the burn mark on the slot and the chip...
My CPU is fine, but it's running a little hot at 36 degrees C on idle. I'm running the comp now and everything seems to be ok except the fact that I don't have sound... I'm surprised and extremely happy that my board still works, luckily, there're multiple RAM slots and I was able to use my good RAM stick on one of them. Things could be a lot worse, I'm glad that it was a $100 dollar ram stick I trashed and not the CPU.
I'm using the E6600's OEM sink.... does anyone here on this forum ever use it? Why did they make it so difficult to put on? I was afraid to press down on it because I was bending my MB.... IMO the sink snap on design really needs some improvements...
Btw, almost forgot to mention, although I'm short 1GB RAM, this new system is really nice! Super fast and smooth. I'm going to have to wait awhile and save up for another stick later on........
Also one last quick question on the side, I installed the sound drivers that came with the Gigabyte board, but I'm not getting sound. I noticed the drivers were compatible with Windows XP SP1, and I have SP2, is that the problem??