no gpu post beep, black screen

HI, I am having another of my minor issues.
asus sabertooth 990 fx motherboard
amd 1100t cpu
evga gtx970 ftw, asus 7850, gigabyte gtx 760.
known, good 750 watt psu.
crucial ballistix sport 1600 ram.

I swapped out my 965 and gskill 1333 for an 1100t with 1600 ram and the wheels just fell right off, no post beep, vga diag light never lights but the power light stays on and the hdd light flashes for hours.
things I have tried.
three gpus.
swapped psus with another rig, other rig runs fine on the psu from this rig.
new cmos battery.
attempted boot from Linux live cd, failed.
965 back in, it will boot, post and beep and give me a screen but the rig is still borked.
there is a detail I'm missing, what is it?

Almost sounds like the 1100 is the problem. You could try re-flasing the BIOS maybe. I have had them get "stuck" before. Have you tested the 1100 in something different?

ran the 1100t in my asus ch5-f testbed, all good at default.

Did you reset the BIOS before you installed the new CPU and ram? Flashed it to the latest, or flash again for giggles?
Have you tried with the new CPU and old ram?
How about old ram and new CPU?

I'll be swapping more stuff around tonight.
I did a full, battery out cmos reset, I am going to reflash to an older bios, I think I'm on 2305.
I have a bunch of good gskill 1600 ram that we ran in all the 1090T rigs at the shop.

the root cause was the crucial ram.
fresh os install with corsair ram, all is good, with gskill ram, all is good, with crucial ram, no post, use the mem ok switch, it booted and corrupted itself.
another fresh install, all is good, update the bios to 2501 and straight to hell in a bucket, I have to use the power button to restart or shut down.
it sets all ram timings to tight, 1600 @7-7-7, no matter what ram is installed so the only ram I have that will boot at the timings and voltage is gskill.
and the really great part is that asus will not let you backdate from 2501!!!!!!!!!
no more asus, never again!!!!!!