Story time! Rewind to May 2010, I've grown tired of crap OEM PCs the extent of my hardware experience was changing ram in 2007 (thanks to crucials ram configurator), I decided to upgrade my PC.
In 2007 I met a guy in school who talked about how he built PCs and Repaired them for a living at a computer store and said if you ever wanna upgrade or build a PC talk to me ill do it for free you just provide the parts. I decided to take him up on that offer and had been talking to him again since 2009.
So I tell my friend I want to upgrade my Vista 64 Ultimate OEM HP Pavillion Media Center PC with a HIS 4870 ICE-Q Edition from newegg for 79.99.
I asked him if it was compatible (remember this is before I met you fine folks!) he said
"No because the power supply was to weak."
I said "I'll upgrade that too"
he said, "No, it wont work because normal power supplies wont fit in there because the retaining screw positions are non standard",
I replied "OK, I'll get a cheap case and swap out the main parts and get the new psu and 4870 and put them in there!"
He replied " No that wont work because the motherboard has nonstanard mounting holes".
so i replied with "Eff it, ill start from scratch."
Now mind you all of the above was lies, he looked up my computer it clearly states under the spec its ATX standard parts. You can see it all here
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...foCategory&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&product=3423004
So the question here is why would he lie about this?
Well here's what I didn't know, his own computer happened to have a standard Sapphire 4870 in it. He also is the really jealous type with a large ego to boot.
His goal was to make me choose a weaker card but didnt suggest it, he just wanted to make it prohibitively expensive to use that 4870 as you could tell by him shooting down each Idea, all of which would've worked just fine.
He knew i had no clue about hardware so he figured he could get away with it, he was right but he didnt count on the results of it lol.
So I didnt know about his nature when got all my parts and i had him build my computer, I didnt know very much about computers , i just knew how to use them well enough.He was also the one that recommended me that crappy "1200" watt power supply i was looking to replace when i made this thread.
You all saw how that turned out in the pics posted earlier in this thread (check those out). (hopefully this is coherent, Im no master novelist!)
It thankfully all turned out fine thanks to you guys here, and I learned to build!
All Thanks to You Guys!