I broke my motherboard installing a M.2 drive

[Quartz]

I tried to add a 4 TB M.2 drive to my PC. To do this I needed to remove my GPU to get access to install the standoff. The GPU release tab broke and in doing so must have broken some of the PCIe traces because none of the PCIe slots worked thereafter. Fortunately I had a spare motherboard to hand. So I replaced my Asus Prime Z790 D4 with a MSI Tomahawk Z790 D4.

It could have been worse: it might have been my RTX 4090 that broke.

 

[Quartz]

Ouch. Expensive mistake but thankfully not £1500 expensive

Yes, I was quite bricking it, but I tried the GPU in another PC and it worked which was quite the relief!

 

[Quartz]

I understand that newer boards have the release tab for the main x16 socket in a more accessible location.