A long while back before life swept all memory of the problem away I was trying to get my computer to not have a seizure every time I put in the graphics card. For some reason I happened to be staring at the pins (see attached images) and noticed that two pins (one on each side, on opposite ends of the board) do not go all the way down like the rest. I --assume-- this means the pins are busted and the card needs to be replaced, but I know that I have a few USB devices that have pins that end in such a manner that work fine. Is it the card or the motherboard?
This is the PCI-E GPU... 100% normal, it's by design. If you look carefully that pin should not even have a wire (on the circuit board) connected to it, or it leads to some dead end.
I see, thank you for answering such a noob question. I never noticed when building the machine, and then it got a pretty good knock when I moved it from my old place to my new place. Busted the antenna from the wireless card and everything. Now anytime ANY PCI/PCI-E card is put in, the computer just reboots endlessly, won't even make it to desktop, only to the XP loading bar. I was going to try disabling the onboard graphics in both device manager in XP and in the bios to see if that would cure it when I noticed the issues in the above post. If the card was damaged there was no point in going through anything else so I thought I'd ask. Thanks for the help.
