Peculiar
So naturally I try to use the motherboard I thought I’d broken one more time, because this time, it just might work!
And for a while, it seems to work, it goes through a post and the whole deal. I finish reassembling everything and it refuses to boot into windows. It goes about halfway through the process and stalls.
I then am in the process of writing down the model number of the motherboard so I can exchange the new one I got last night for one with the proper socket when I notice the AGP card is a bit askew. I shove it back in a little bit and presto! It all works. So basically all of my effort was for nothing then. And it’s still noisy.