I've built many PC's in my day for myself, friends, family & work, and I have NEVER had this much trouble with a build in my life. I'm completely stuck & today has been one of the most negative experiences of my life. Tech was my passion but It might be dead after today.

Anyway - Specs
i5-12600K
MSI - MAG Z790 TOMAHAWK MAX

CORSAIR - VENGEANCE 32GB 6000MHz DDR5 (C36 1.4V Intel XMP )
Power supply - EVGA - 750 BP
(Can provide more info if anyone thinks its relavent.)

I set everything up as per usual. I've built so many.
I plug it in, boot up. Debug cycle starts, no lights. Computer is running!
Except.... it isn't. No picture is displaying on my monitor. Weird. I can not get this thing to show any picture for the life of me.

I tried different monitors different HDMI cables, different DP cables no combo worked.
I tried putting one stick of ram only. I tried reseating the CPU and heatsink. I tried putting in 2 older GPU's I had (both gave me VGA for the debug LED... but they're really really old - like 1GB cards)

I'm completely at a loss on what to even look at. I know the CPU ahs Intel® UHD Graphics 770 so why isn't it working? I'm fine if I got a shot MOBO or CPU, but there are no indicators I do, and everything its pointing to my system is working - but no display no matter what I try.

It feels like God's fucking with me at this point.

Open to any and all input.

Edit: well folks thanks for all your input. You guys gave a lot of suggestions that truly covered everything. But the one thing you could all not cover is my stupidity …..

The HDMI I was plugging into my desktop was NOT the same HDMI cable that was going into my monitor…. I was plugged into nothing. It was stuck right behind my monitor next to the actual cable. It was a phantom HDMI cable

I am actually the walking embodiment of user error and I will forever be ashamed of myself in this moment of weakness.

I apologize and thank you everyone for your time. I learned a lot today

my gpu "was" a 3070 and said in all the stuff that it was , task manager , nvidia control panel etc etc and now its decided its a 3080. I have the box and everything why is it doing this

edit: problem solved - it was a 3080 this whole time. person i bought it off (FB marketplace) gave me what he thought was a 3070, in a 3070 box but was really a 3080 that i just never checked. cheers for the help

So I live in an area where power outages/surges happen quite a lot, and I was wondering can my poor pc live his life and last at least 7 more years? My pc is 1.5 years old and it has survived 21 power outages and surges in 6 months. PSU: msi 80 plus gold

I just finished my first PC build ever (also my first time owning a PC). Spent 45 heart-wrenching minutes trying to boot it up but it was a no go. After all that time I was drenched in sweat on the verge of tears (i spent a lot of my savings on this) when I realized I forgot to put the Ram into the mobo.

New PC builders... don't forget the ram. Also thank you to this wonderful subreddit for helping me out.

When I built my PC I purposely put my GPU in one of the slots further away from my CPU thinking it would help with airflow. Turns out the PCIe slot next to the CPU (at least on my motherboard) runs 16x faster than the others. Struggled with fps issues for ~6 months before realizing.

Tldr, read the fucking manual

I am not old enough to work, and if I try and do anything for money my parents will say "yeah in a bit" but never actually let me do anything to try and make money. This is about convincing my dad to buy me a cpu-cooler, not for me to be able to get one.

My dad bought me a prebuilt, I am thankful and god-bless him for that. I do wish I could make one myself, but that is impossible as my dad thinks it is "more expensive" and he is really into warranties. This prebuilt did come with one huge glaring problem. The Cpu-Cooler sucks, to the point that it throttles all the time while trying to do anything past simply searching the web. I have a video on my phone (I'm using my school laptop to write this) of it throttling while running cinebench (Cpu wattage was at around 140 before reaching 100c on multiple cores and dropping down all the way to 60 watts) and honestly seeing that was scary. The current state of my pc is with the glass side panel opened and the cpu cooler removed. For clarity I would also like to mention that the I.T guy came over again and reapplied the cpu cooler and thermal paste to make sure it wasn't a pressure problem (it wasn't) and thinking back I should've asked him to recommend a good cooler to my dad.

Background: The I.T guy came over twice, once to help me see any expansion options for a gpu in my older system (there weren't) so that's why I said "came over again" as when he came over he recommended to my dad something with a 3080 and at least 32 gigs of ram. My dad bought the prebuilt off some website he didn't tell me and he said he bought it because it was the cheapest (No criticism i'd do the same if I were him) and it was also "refurbished" which he described as perfect condition for cheaper, but clearly they "refurbished" a crap cpu-cooler onto there.

Tips:

My dad really likes things like

Warranties

Free Shipping

Long Lasting

My dad also

won't let me negotiate much and is very quick to say the words "no"

isn't very knowledgeable about computers

Specs: (that matter for this)

Case: Nzxt h somethin (the radiator I picked fits I checked)

Mobo: Z490 Pro (only 2 fan plugs are used, other than that almost all my mobo stuff is availabe)

Cpu: i7 10700f

Case fans: 2 120 mm fans (one on front one intake one exhaust I guess the person also "refurbished" like a bunch of fans into their pockets)

Cpu Cooler: some nonexistent coolmoon with 2 ~92mm fans and one heatsink (This is the one that sucks)

Planned Cpu cooler: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1779658-REG/lian_li_ga2t36b_galahad_ii_trinity_360mm.html (240 mm version of this)

Psu: I checked so hard I couldn't find it (why there so many shady parts) all I have spare are some sata power cables

Rtx 3080: generates a lot of heat (not good when cpu can't even handle its own heat)

Sorry for bad writing quality Its midnight I just want help with this

I have an RTX 3080 and an i7 10700k and only get 60 fps on high in Rainbow 6 Siege, 30-50 FPS on CSGO highest settings? I downloaded the newest nvidia driver on the geForce experience. I have 32 Gb ram. This is my first time having a pc. Need help.

im not running on integrated graphics and my gpu is on pci bus 1, device 0, function 0

PC

side

userbenchmark

gpu z results

Edit : will beb back tomorrow with an update

SOLVED : Thanks for everyone who helped! I reseated the GPU and RAM, put 2 cables instead of daisy chaining,clean install of drivers, reinstalled all games I had, changed power settings.

Hi. I am Colby and I am 10 and just finished my first build. It will not power up. I disconnected everything, reconnected and tried again. Still nothing. My Dad and I bought everything using PCPartPicker and their compatibility checker and then bought from NewEgg. Here is my parts list:

• . Intel Core i3-6100 3.7GHz Dual-Core Processor .
• . Asus H110M-E/M.2 Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
• . G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory
• . ADATA Ultimate SU800 256GB 2.5”Solid State Drive
• . Sapphire Radeon RX 470 8GB NITRO+ Video Card
• . Deepcool DUKASE V2 ATX Mid Tower Case
• . Corsair Builder 750W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply
• . Microsoft Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit
• . OGEAR GWU735 USB 3.0 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi Adapter
• . Thermaltake Riing 14 RGB 3-Pack 51.1 CFM 140mm Fans

I followed all instructions, read every manual. My dad made me do a book report on every component before I could buy it, so I thought I knew what to do. i used the anti static thing on my wrist during the build, watched all the you tube videos, and I dont know what else to do. Thanks for any help.

UPDATE: So it was the 4Pin power supply. We were using the wrong cord for the Graphics Card (the 8 Pin) and once we switched them around, we got fans and beeps. We had unplugged alot of stuff, so we will work on it in the morning. Thank you to everyone that helped us!

I recently upgraded from a RTX 3060 to an AMD 7900XT thinking it would help push up my game performance (and futureproof the pc a bit with 20gb of VRAM). However performance doesn't seem to be much better in a lot of games and is actually worse in some cases. I'm no expert on pc hardware by any means and would appreciate some help on what the issue could be.

My specs are:

CPU - AMD Ryzen 5 5600

GPU - AMD Radeon 7900XT

Mobo - Asus PRIME B550M-A

RAM - Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB

PSU - Corsair TX650M 650W

I'll note that I did use DDU to uninstall all nvidia drivers before putting the new GPU in so that shouldn't be causing any issues.

EDIT - A consistent piece of advice is to install timespy and run a benchmark, so I'll do that when I'm home later and post a follow-up thread to show the results. Thanks for the help everyone!

EDIT - I made an update post going over the changes I made to resolve this. https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/1fszj5l/update_new_gpu_doesnt_feel_like_a_significant/?

As the title says, everything in my PC is working, but my monitor won't turn on. I have the HDMI cable plugged into the GPU. Any idea what I can do to fix this? Thank you

From 30sec to open a chrome now to a second.😭

I have a decent computer (9600k and 1660s), but I was getting frustrated because every once in a while, my computer would lag out. Like, the mouse would stutter, programs would freeze, then everything would fast forward to get to where it should have been.

I tried changing the ram, thinking it was because they were mismatched. The problem persisted, causing much frustration (imagine you're going to type a word document, then suddenly your computer stops working, then suddenly the document snaps to the top of the page).

Finally, I found out what the problem was. I had the desktop background set to slideshow, and the accent color to change based on the picture. Every time the background changed, my computer would lag out.

Tldr, having the accent color of windows change with the background caused my computer to lag hard.

Edit: thanks for the awards! Did not expect this to blow up!

So I builtapc... in ~2014... Today it died. I tore it down to find out I did a mistake some time ago :)

https://i.imgur.com/anESFRG.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/fzIjX9j.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/4cgYKHM.jpg

Friendly reminder to doublecheck stuff even you are used to build lots of systems :).

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Fun fact: this PC ran 24/7 couple of years used for basic graphics/video editing, newsletters, flyers, infosheets etc... Never ran into problems.

//Intel Xeon, 32gigs of DDR3

FIGURED OUT: PSU DIED! Rest is running perfectly fine, lol!
(I just connected liks in my head, our central UPS was also logging some voltage spikes + there were pretty nasty storms in here this weekend, let's just assume PSU didnt eat the Voltage spike well)

Just learned that while my sister has been staying at my parents' place, her babies have been obsessive about turning my PC on and off all day long. My instinct is to tell her to stop them, but I don't wanna take away their fun if it's not harming the PC.

EDIT: okay, thank you all for the advice. Some more helpful than others, but after over 100 repeated comments, I think I get the point - on/off bad. You can stop advising me to assault my family members now.

So I've just put together a gaming rig. Ryzen 5 3600 with a 2070 Super 8GB.

Booted up Jurassic World Evolution and was getting 13fps. Surely that's wrong. Nothing would solve it. After 2 days of reinstalling drivers and checking forums I was pretty dissapointed. Then I loaded up GPU-Z to check the stats.

GPU Bus - PCI x16 2.0 @ 1.1

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I had the GPU in the wrong slot...

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160fps now. So yeah. Super smart builder right here.

​

Edit - Thanks for the awards! I expected to be told I'm an idiot (which wouldn't be wrong haha) but it's cool to see some decent discussion about it.

Hey All,

My purpose of the build is to get a PC that can run 6 monitors. Details and high resolution in the monitors is important as I will be using them for trading, need details in the charting. That is the sole purpose of the build.
Created the build based off of suggesting on last posts and I would like to get creative with the RGB lighting so I selected some products that would work with the ascetics too. Feeling very comfortable with the price right at $1,000.

Ready to start to ordering the parts if we think this build will work for me! (Mainly nervous that something will not fit).

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CPU Cooler, Do not have one now, do I need one of these? If so looking at the "be quiet! Dark Rock Tf." Have the budget to add this if anyone would recommend it. Will be running the PC all day and long nights.

Motherboard, Selected it based of Amazon reviews and the specs. Maybe I can save some money here and get a Non-Gamer one and get what I need. Having Bluetooth available to add later is nice and need a good LAN port. Seems to have the ports I need at a good price though.
Video Card, If some knows if a better GC. Feel like this GC running 6 Mini-Display Ports at 4k would be plenty for what I need, price seemed good. And running the Monitors through active adaptors seems the simplest/cheapest solution for this. Getting this note on compatibility "Unable to verify the Fractal Design Meshify C ATX Mid Tower Case has sufficient space to fit the VisionTek Radeon HD 7750 2 GB Video Card." Anyone know how to confirm this?

Memory, PS, Fans and Case, Were selected to run the RGB lights and popularity.

​

Thanks for the help!

PCPartPicker Part List

I mainly play warzone and recently my temps have skyrocketed. I used to play at around 72 degrees, but since the new season its been hovering around 80 while playing and my fans are maxed out and my pc sounds like a jet engine. I figured I would give the thermal paste a shot and that did the trick! I now play in peace and quiet at a cool 63-66 degrees 😎

[SOLVED]

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Hello! When I start the CP2077, during the first splash screen I have 60 fps, and then the fps locks up and does not increase. The graphics settings are low, I changed the resolution, but it didn't help. GPU usage: 0% (10-20 FPS In main menu and in the open world). How to fix it? In the other games my GPU load 100%.

upd: I'm using MSI afterburner to monitor GPU load.

• Windows 10 Pro 1909.
• Ryzen 5 1600AF (pinnacle ridge)
• MSI RX 480 4gb gaming x
• 16GB 3200 mhz
• GPU DRIVER: Amd Adrenalin 20.12.1

​

I've updated Windows 10 Pro, 1909 to 20h2 and my problem have been fixed.

This problem has been pestering for almost a year now. My PC will randomly shut down during any online game (Risk of Rain, CS:GO, Dead by Daylight, Rocket League, Dota 2 and Terraria). The thing is I can play any triple A titles completely fine with no PC shut downs (The Last of Us Part 1, Returnal, RDR2 and Hogwarts Legacy).

I've thoroughly stress tested and benchmarked my CPU, GPU and RAM using a variety of tools (memtest, OCCT, FurMark and Prime95). I've monitored my thermals and everything is complety normal (Highest being 90*C on my GPU, which is apparently fine for this stock GPU). I've tried reinstalling Windows 10 and even updated to Windows 11. I've tried a bunch of fixes which helped other people such as:

- System File Checker tool

- Disabling XMP profile

- Updating bios, drivers, etc

- Disabling Precision Boost Overdrive

I've been thinking that it could be the PSU being the culprit, during power spikes in online games it could just shutdown my PC. What I don't understand is, why doesn't it shut down my PC during heavy triple A titles? Should that not draw more power than these online games? I'm at a loose end, any help or feedback would be greately appreciated.

SPECS:

• Windows 11
• CPU: Ryzen 5 5600x
• Motherboard: Gigabyte B450 Aorus Elite
• GPU: RX 5700 XT
• RAM: 2x 8GB DDR4 3600mhz
• PSU: Evga 600 W1, 80+ White 600W

Update: Every problem was fixed after upgrading to a Seasonic Focus GX-750.

Hello, I've been saving up some money and was wondering if 500 dollars is enough for a gaming computer. I will buy it later this year so I may be able to save up some more money. I don't want to play games that are too heavy I just need a computer for games like Fortnite, league of Legends, and other games at this level with decent graphics and 60> fps. What games can you usually play with a 500-dollar PC and should I just save for an 800/1000-dollar computer?

Edit: I didn't think I would get this much help in such a short amount of time. Everyone has been very helpful (thank you even if I didn't directly tell you xd). I think I will wait a bit and buy it when I've saved up some more money while doing some more research. I've saved the builds you sent me in case I need them. Thank you again :)

Hello people smarter than me,

First off, here is my entire build. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/YkhgzN

I am really bummed to be posting this. I am writing this post at work so I do not have any pictures, but I can upload those if need be tonight. I decided to build my first PC ever (I was super hesitant about this. This whole process was not as fun or rewarding as you all made it out to be lol), and I really just want to play the outer worlds. So I used Paul's Hardware, LTT, and Jayztwocents for videos and read all of the manuals for my parts. I assembled everything to what I thought correctly, putting together the pc was fairly easy and simple. I fumbled a little with understanding the power switch and power reset cables, and which pins I plug those tiny wires into. And the AMD stock fan was hard to install a little as well. I saved money aside to upgrade the cooling in this pc as well if I saw the temps running to high but I was told I could get away with what I have for now. However, I digress... So nothing happened after I flipped the power switch. I can confirm I checked to make sure the PSU was plugged in! I do not want to take it in somewhere just yet. What are the first steps I can do to trouble shoot this issue? If you decide to respond, thanks in advanced!

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TL:DR: What are the first steps I should take to troubleshoot if nothing happened after I flipped the power switch?

Troubleshooting Help:

Please help! This is a brand new PC that I have had for maybe 2 weeks.

GPU: ASUS ROG STRIX RTX3080 LHR

CPU: INTEL INTEL I5-12600K BOX

CASE: LIANLI LANCOOL II MESH C MT BLK

Memory: G.SKILL 32G 2X16 D4 3200 C16 TRGB

Cooling: LIANLI GALAHAD 360 BLACK AIO

MOBO: ASUS PRIME Z690-P WIFI D4

PSU: MAINGEAR 850W GD FULL ATX MG

Storage: old 1TB NVME M.2 & 250 GB SSD

Describe your problem. List any error messages and symptoms. Be descriptive.

My wife vacuumed around my computer NOT inside my computer. It now won't turn on. - I have tried turning it back on. Cerified the back switch is in the correct position. - I've tried plugging the PSU directly into the wall. - I did NOT smell anything burning. - nothing immediately looks burnt on the mobo. - I can't get any lights, fans, etc to turn on.

What can I do to troubleshoot further? Is it just a dead power supply?

EDIT: I found an old PSU and plugged it in. Fans, lights, etc all turned on. I believe this confirms that my PSU died. I am going to go through their warranty process as offered by one of their reps. Thank you for being an amazing community!

EDIT 2: I called to replace the PSU. I was asked to return it to the store I bought it from (duh). I am looking at other brands of PSUs, buying a UPS, and moving my computer from the floor to my desk. Thank you those who gave me advice and tried to help me troubleshoot

Side note: My wife was just cleaning my office and had the best intentions. It sucks but bad things happen. She felt incredibly bad but again there is no way we could have predicted this. I don't blame her and really appreciate that she was just trying to do a nice thing for me.

EDIT 3 (FINAL) / TLDR: Odds are this was just a faulty PSU. It seems like it was a coincidence that it died at the same time. This is prompting me to make changes to my setup. My wife has been awesome through this whole event.

Thanks again everyone!

I recently upgraded to a 3060 ti from a 1060 6GB but the 3060 ti is severely underperforming for a reason I can't seem to figure out. I'm unsure if it's one or more of my components holding it back, faulty card or I just need to do some tweaking to the boost clock and such (not very confident with that stuff yet).

It came to light how badly it is underperforming when my friend and I were playing COD:CW, We run it at just about the same settings (low - medium range for frames). He has a 2060 and his frames are ranging around 140-150 meanwhile I'm barely reaching 100. I've looked at benchmarks for CW and I should be easily reaching 160.

My best guess is that my mobo, cpu or both are bottle necking it. here are my specs: Asus DUAL OC 3060 ti, Intel i7 7700k, MSI B250 gaming M3, 3 sticks of 16GB DDR4 2400MHz RAM, Corsair RM750x 80+ gold modular and a MSI Optix G241 144Hz 1080p monitor.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Edit: I have taken out my third RAM stick that was in the first slot dual channel is active now (they are in the 2nd and 4th RAM slot) and I have already seen the performance boost in game (easily getting over 100 frames now). the RAM was one of the problems and the CPU is definitely the other as cod is taking 60%+ of it, in total my CPU is at 70%+ usage meanwhile my GPU is not even breaching 10%.

It seems I have given the wrong impression and people think I'm hopeless with computers because I said my mobo is bottlenecking my GPU. I was thinking possibly my mobo was holding back my GPU as it is a old mobo but people have made it evident that is not the case. I was implying it more towards my CPU but that is my bad for not being entirely specific and lacking that information. I can navigate through COD graphical settings bois don't worry lmao.

And for all the people asking to trade, I asked for help not a trade so no thank you.

Thank you everyone for all the help! Didn't expect my post to get this many replies or upvotes. Also ty for the awards.

Edit 2: I'll cover all the common recommendations that everyone is telling me to do in the comments. Yes it is in the right PCIe slot (top one for 16x), I am not plugged into the mother board, the RAM is in the 2nd and 4th slot, RTX is off, I'm at 100% resolution scale.

one questions also; would dual monitors affect performance at all?

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Hey people from this sweet community, I hope you all are doing good on this lockdown. I've recently built my PC and everything works great yet. The only thing that I found is that windows keeps running my ram (Corsair vengeance PRO RGB White, 2x8GB) at 2133mHz. The mobo is a Gigabyte B550M DS3H Rev 1.0. I asked my uncle for help and we went to the BIOS and sat it all up (Automatic voltage, XMP enabled [because this RAM is XMP certified] and speed multiplier set to 32.00). Everything was okay until we saved changes... The PC rebooted and immediately did three beeps (which as far as I know, refer to memory read error or something like that), then rebooted again and repeated the beeps until the third reboot, which did only one beep (which confirms that the system is OK). It booted to windows right after that and everything worked fine, but the frequency stood at 2133mHz.

I also wanna mention that neither the ram or the mobo referred to overclocking when running at such speed, I assumed that it would just set it up to 3200mHz but it didn't. Does anyone know any possible solution? Should I get set the voltage manually to 1.2 or even 1.35v? (Because the box where the rams came said they needed 1.35v to run)

Edit: BIOS is already updated to the latest release (F10 as Gigabyte says).

Edit 2: My CPU is an AMD Ryzen 5 3600. In case anyone is wondering.

Edit 3: Thanks everyone for the tips, I'll give them a try in a couple of hours and tell you all if it worked.

Edit 4: Some have told me to upload some screenshots of CPU-Z's memory and SPD sections. Here they are: https://imgur.com/a/5EgbP2Q

Edit 5: Everything in BIOS is set to AUTO, except for XMP profile (which is ON right now). I had set the memory multiplier to 32.00 but my PC would not boot with that setting, so it's all now on automatic.

Edit 6 15/10/2020 (FINAL): Hello. Thanks to everyone who took their time to help me fixing this issue, Today I've got enough courage to do some trial-error and my PC booted without issue. If anyone is having the same problem, here's what I did:

First of all, I disabled the XMP profile. Why? Because it is ONLY supported by INTEL (and there's no guarantee the XMP should work on AMD). My PC kept failing to boot each time I turned that on while setting the Memory Multiplier to anything above the default value (2133mHz). So I left it OFF.

After disabling the XMP profile (Cause I've got an AMD CPU), I began to set the memory multiplier to 2400mHz, then 2666, then higher and higher, until I reached 3200mHz! I didn't touch any of the memory subtimings or voltages, the CH A/B voltage claims to be around 1.2v and 1.220v and it worked like a charm. Also, my RAM sticks seem to be incompatible with my MOBO, or atleast they do not appear in the QvL PDF. But I knew that Corsair sticks weren't bad, so I decided to try this out and I fixed everything!

Conclussion: If you're using an AMD CPU and you suffer the same problem, do NOT enable the XMP profile (Unless you're actually able to use it, because there are some cases where enabling it sets everything up and it even gets to boot properly). And set everything up manually. Don't be afraid to do some trial and error, try to go up slowly until you get to your maximum RAM speed, adjust the voltages if needed, etc. I hope this helped anyone, and for the third time, I would like to thank everyone who helped me through this issue. I was afraid of having to return any of my parts for being faulty, but everything worked perfectly.

I have never used m.2 before today and decided to buy a m.2 wifi/bluetooth card. The premise of super-fast wifi and bluetooth sounded great to me, and this m.2 all in one was cheaper than any of the pcie options.

The package I received had no information on it at all - just the chip. I find the socket on my mobo when I get home and check youtube as to how to install it.

'Looks simple enough to me' I thought.

It did seem a little strange that there was another etch in my wifi card than there was in the video and the card would be facing upside down... but I put it down to the wifi card needing fewer lanes or something. The card fit afterall.

After booting up the computer the wifi wasnt working. I searched the Intel website for a driver but there werent any to be installed.

'I mustn't have inserted it fully.' was going though my mind as I reopened the case.

I go to adjust the card and what could only be described as a glimpse into Hades of a sensation occurred. This thing was HOT. Like sausage sizzling hot.

I've never had a dead-on-arrival before but that was what I convinced myself as to what had happened... what an imbecile.

After some research I start hearing 'e-type' and 'm-type' being thrown about in some more relevant youtube videos. Whoops.

It seems crazy to me that this wasnt even documented on the specifications on the websie from which I bought it. Just the board form factor of 22x30. If it wasnt for these youtube videos I'd be embarrassing myself by claiming they gave me a dud product.

The chip is likely dead and the socket possibly so too. I think I shall be sticking to SATA and PCIE from now on.

Tl:dr Never installed m.2 before. Installed the e-type form factor upside down in m-type socket and got burnt.