Alright, I need help troubleshooting my pc.

So, I told my brother I was planning on building a gaming desktop, so he sent me this case from his graveyard. The case as 4 sticks of 4gb corsair vengeance ram, a 700w power supply, dvd drive, Gigabtye motherboard (http://www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3897#sp), Intel i7 CPU (http://www.cpu-world.com/sspec/SR/SR00C.html), a 500 gb harddrive and a 550ti video card. He told me the processor was running hot, and he wasn't sure if it was the processor that was faulty or the hit sink. The heat sink is a coolit eco-240.

Anyway so here is what I did. I put everything together, thermal paste on the cpu and all. I got it to post, tried to boot from my windows 7 disk. Unfortunately, I don't have a monitor, so I hooked it up to the t.v. After pressing any key to boot from the disk I couldn't read the next line of script because the resolution wasn't right. So I unplugged the HDMI to switch to a smaller t.v. (hoping the resolution would be better) and i accidentally dropped the hdmi cord into the case and it touched the motherboard. When it touched the motherboard the computer restarted. Since then, I can't get a post or any type of signal to the t.v. My keyboard no longer turns on either, regardless of which USB port it is plugged into. Another note: I don't have an HDMI mini cord, so I've been using the on board graphics. I don't even have the 550 ti in the motherboard, so it's not a graphics card problem. I've gone through this (http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/261145-31-perform-steps-posting-post-boot-video-problems) troubleshooting process to no avail.

What do you guys think. Here are my theories.
A) I somehow fried the motherboard by dropping the cable in. Which makes no sense to me. As far as I know, the copper plating on a usb is just for protection so the usb won't break. I don't see how any current is going through it, so I don't see how the metal casing on a usb could surge my motherboard.
B) Perhaps coincidentally, my CPU blew at the exact moment I dropped the cable because the processor got too hot do to the possibly faulty heat sink.

At any rate, what more can I do to troubleshoot this?

If I have to buy a new motherboard then I'll be picking up a new processor as well since the one I have right now is pretty old anyway. I was already planning on spending this kind of money so it isn't a big deal. But if I could somehow pin it down to just a faulty CPU then I'd rather just buy a new CPU instead of a new motherboard. My optimal outcome is that I'm somehow missing something and my motherboard and CPU are still intact and that I just need to buy a new heat sink. Right now, I'm borrowing a stock intel heat sink so I don't have to trouble shoot my coolit eco-240 heat sink.

WHIPLASH I'M GOING TO NZ THIS YEAR

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This... is honestly outside of my scope but I'm going to give the tried and true advice of..."Turn it off, replug everything and turn it back on" might want to go ahead and clear the CMOS too.

Hell if you feel like doing it right I would even go ahead and remove the ramsticks + GPU. then try booting with a single stick (if that don't work try the next etc).

I don't think dropping a cable into it coulda fried the crap outta your mobo unless you were extremely unlucky but I might be wrong here. If you have a friend/family member with a similar system (same chipset) you can easily swap procs and see if it works. But I'd do that after all of what I just described.

Their mobo+ your proc works? = yer mobo is done and the inverse.

If you end up finding no solution I'd be happy to try and help you budget out a new system, but I'm hoping it doesn't come to that. I'll try to remember to check back here, hopefully someone more knowledgable will think of a fix tho.

[Edit] I can't find ya on my contact list but if you're on skype give me a shout. I also just realized this post is rather old so IDK if you've solved the issue.

I ended up just buying a new mobo and pcu.

I think I figured out what happened. When I dropped the cable it must have shorted my "Clear CMOS" pins (quite the unlucky freak accident), and apparently that'll easily kill your motherboard if you do it while it's running. I figured this out by shorting it again while it was on, same sort of response where it all restarted suddenly. I ended up buying a new MoBo and PCU. Probably didnt need a PCU but I didnt really wanna have to get an intel-friendly mobo and be stuck with expensive intel PCUs if the PCU was in fact bad.

Thanks for the response though Luis. Just in case you're curious, I went with a budget build, Gigabyte Mobo (150$ iirc) and a 6 core 3.3 GHz AMD processor (120$ iirc). Cant remember exact models, cant be fucked to look it up.

You do know that copper and gold has a high electric conductivity properties right? You accidentally dropping the hdmi cable on the motherboard most likely shorted it out due to acting as a high conductive ground.

Nice upgrade! Can't go wrong with that and it's a bargain for the performance. :)

Good luck on your build!