This day! I think I aged a decade...
It all began quite fine, expecting to do some final things for the exam tomorrow, feeling well prepared - just to work out the last few rough edges. Boy, was I wrong. My girlfriend has a Blender project for university due on Friday and as it turns out neither does Blenders renderer support GPU rendering on AMD graphics cards, nor is there any chance she'll get her stuff done in time on the CPU. So... what to do? I offered "Hm... I was planning to buy a new GPU some time in the next months, for TW3, you know. I could do that NOW, but the most promising candidate (GTX 970) has a couple of problems and uncertainties about it right now, so I'd rather wait a bit."
After debating the alternatives and coming up with nothing practicable, we decide to make the big call and I'll just get a 980 instead - it's for a good cause after all! The problem: I wanted a specific one (if I'm gonna spend THAT kind of money, it won't be for a "good enough" model), and it wasn't in stock anywhere in the city. On the adventure goes: It's not quite noon, so I decide to take the train to the nearest town that got one (~1 hour there, 1 hour back again) and buy it there. Works like a charm, the guy at the store laughs at me for taking such a trip and spending €600 on a GPU, mostly so that my girlfriend could render some stuff.
Back home, I plug it in and - my worst fear comes true - I knew my PSU was a close call with 550W, but hoped for the best. No such luck, today. Only one 8-pin connector, two required. Plus, only 2x20A on the 12V rail, 42A required. A little desperate but feeling close to the finish, I go to the closest PC shop. It's 4PM by that time. Being the informed guy that always buys proper PSUs, I get an Enermax PSU and return home.
All plugged in, time to fire it up... and it works. At 6.30PM. Booting takes suspiciously long, but that happens with some new hardware in it. After a couple of reboots, no improvements and finally it doesn't boot at all. Research time! It seems the Geforce GTX900 series sometimes have some problems in that regard, but with some luck a new BIOS version might fix it. So, I unplug the GTX980, switch to the internal GPU of the CPU and flash the BIOS. Aaaaaand.... it does boot again! And fast! ... and a Blue Screen of Death. No! Nonono! I cannot have completely destroyed my Windows installation! Nope, I didn't. Some fiddling with the BIOS settings did the trick and all works fine. It's about 8PM now. Time to get all set up and then do some rendering.
Rendering a frame with these settings. Wow, that's fast. Rendering a frame with those settings. Nice. Renderi.... the power of the PC is gone. Completely. No reboot, no Black or Blue Screen of Death, no fans turning. Nothing. Trying to fire it up: nothing. Unplug, plug back in. Nothing. Unplug the 980, try again: nothing. Not the GPU, apparently, good news. Unplugging everything to complete bare bones and trying to start it: not a sound. Could the brand new PSU have died? Unlikely. So did something fry my motherboard/CPU? Oh god, please no.
Time to get my old PSU back into play: Plugging in bare bones and.... it starts. Curses. Cheers. More curses. A look on the clock: 10PM - all shops closed, long ago. No chance to get a new PSU now. My girlfriend hurries of to university, to get as many PCs as she can in one of their computer pools and have each one render a couple of frames over night. And I'm sitting here, sharing this story and remembering that I intended to do some stuff for tomorrow's exam. More, very explicit, curses. Madness. Complete and utter MADNESS! Me spending more than double of what I usually would on a GPU seemed mad from the beginning, but how could I have known what would follow?
tl;dr: FML!
@Blothulfur : Get me some of your strongest, nastiest stuff! I'm a man in desperate need!