I'm never going to build a PC again. If I want something to run Windows I'll buy a Dell, if I want something to do some work on I'll by an Apple, and if I want a server I'll buy a server. I'm not going to be tempted by the lure of cheap parts again.
The PCCHIPS motherboard I got was bad. What made it even worse was that I popped into work and found out that we'd bought more-or-less the same board before and had the same problem. I must have blocked out the bad experiance. I came home with another motherboard that worked.
It powered up and I did a little dance and screwed everything back together. I put the SUSE disk in and booted it to the pretty menu. Selected install. It hung. Selected "safe install". It hung. Pulled out the Highpoint Rocket 100. It looked so promising until the progress bar got all the way to the right and hung. Rebooted. Selected "safe install". It got past this point, showed me an spinning clock thing for a few seconds, then a red dialog box telling me "an unknown error has occured", and then hung.
Have I mentioned recently how much I like Apple?
lol... I had exactly the same problem with a PCCHIPS motherboard. Fairly simple solution tbh...
PCCHIPS ship their motherboards with the CMOS jumper in the shorted position, which is fair enough. Documentation states it too iirc... all you need to do is move the jumper to get it working.