After i bought everything, having spent god knows how much, i build my PC for the first time. Switch on, nothing. No video output, just the fans and HDD spinning up to say "close but no cigar". I try to RMA my board after buying a new BIOS chip (as if it was an old BIOS revision, my D0 step CPU may've been incompatible). The board goes to the UK Asus RMA center, at a cost of £16 to me. They say "the CPU socket is damaged" and send it back to me. I'm now livid at the possibility of buying a new motherboard, and being able to do nothing sensible about it. I had a look at the CPU slot, to find some small irregularities with the pins. As some of you know, unlike other CPUs the i7 CPU itself has no pins, they are all on the motherboard. I struggle to think, anything would do if it was logical... i had no other options. So, I ran a metal keyring (really thin metal) in between the pins on the motherboard and carefully bent them to what looked about right. I reordered some thermal compound (the old Intel wax from before had gone horrible) and turned it on. At first, nothing. I tried turning it off, but this time it was different. Before when the pins were bent i needed to hold down the power button to shut down. This time i only needed to press it. I changed output to the DVi and vrooooom! It burst into life =D I'm so happy to have the most annoying PC build ever behind me.

tl;dr: mobo CPU socket was broken, fixed it with a metal keyring by guessing how the pins should've looked.