Well, the saga ended unhappily. Was net browsing yesterday when my rig locked up, and seconds later the smell of burning electronics filled the room. Yanked the power cord, opened the case, streams of grey smoke filling the case. Pulled everything out, unplugged everything, attached to another PSU and tried booting with one stick of RAM and old S3 Virge PCI backup card, streams of grey smoke poured from the cap near the EPS 8-pin connector and the board displayed random garbage on the LED debugger (not whole letters or numbers, just fragments lighting up).

Now to see how long warranty takes, seeing as the board was bought from Newegg in the USA earlier this year, and I'm now back in Australia again.