He thought he’d done everything right: components, assembly, connections. But when it came to the graphics card, one detail completely blocked him. And what appeared to be a strange hardware bug… was in fact a simple beginner’s mistake!
There are times in life when you feel that technology has won the day. Moments when, faced with a brand new PC, the latest components, and tutorials watched over and over again, you end up wondering why you just can’t do it. And that’s exactly what happened to one Reddit user, who thought he’d done everything right… until he came across a tiny but crucial detail. The kind of detail that, once spotted, makes you want to bang your head against the wall.
The post in question was published on the famous subreddit r/pcmasterrace by a certain IncreaseUnlikely9700, clearly at the end of his tether. In his message, accompanied by a photo of his brand-new RTX 5070, he writes: “My 5070 doesn’t seem to fit in the PCIe1 slot. I don’t want to break something by forcing it… Isn’t that where it plugs in? The end of the port doesn’t match the shape of the connector on my graphics card at all…”
And indeed, the image shows a graphics card with a rather abnormally shaped PCIe connector.
That’s when aragorn18, another forum user, steps in, spotting the problem straight away and explaining it with all the benevolence that can be found on Reddit when the error is really basic: “There is a plastic cover on the PCIe slot of the graphics card. Remove it.”
Silence in the room. And then the first man’s fateful reply: “This project really made me realize how stupid I am, thank you”
We may smile at the anecdote, but it will speak volumes to anyone who has ever assembled a PC themselves. Yes, even the most meticulous can be fooled by this kind of detail. A plastic label, a safety cover, an incorrectly engaged switch… It doesn’t take much to turn a quiet assembly into an existential nightmare. And at the end of the day, that’s the charm of DIY computing: you learn by doing it wrong. That little moment of humiliation, when you realize that you’ve been stuck for an hour because of a simple piece of plastic, is part of the journey. It’s not stupidity, it’s just experience, one stupid mistake after another.
On Reddit, and in particular on the pcmasterrace forum, reactions were as amused as they were sympathetic. Some shared their own moments of technical solitude, between RAM inserted backwards and thermal paste forgotten. And that’s the beauty of these communities: we have fun, we help each other out, and we all learn to play things down a little.
