Okay, here's the story. One of my friends from high school saw my PC when he was at my house last year. Ever since he saw modded skyrim at 1440p, he wanted to get into PC gaming. I told him "I could help you build a PC for $500 (including the OS) that will perform just as good or better than the Xbox one, which he was considering getting at the time. Now, my friend doesn't currently have a job, so saving up the money was hard and it took a long time. After a few months, he comes up with $500. We begin looking at different parts on pcpartpicker. After a few days, we get a list of good parts that go with his budget. He orders the parts and they arrive at his doorstep that week. (I'll post his original specs as soon as I can. Mobile sucks)
We get the thing built, and it boots up and we see the BIOS. Now for some reason, windows 8 won't boot from the flash drive I had. I do some research and I find that the motherboard we bought was not compatible with windows 8. At this point, I feel like I'm gonna throw up. All those months of waiting to buy the parts and he got really screwed over because I didn't do the proper research before I told him to buy the parts. He send it back and gets a refund six weeks later. SIX WEEKS.
During those six weeks, he was able to save up a little bit more money (his PC is about $750 now). then he buys an MSI 970 gaming motherboard, which is compatible with all of his parts and also supports windows 8. We build the PC again, only to find out that nothing pops up on the monitor. No bios, just a black screen. We tried several different monitors. None of them had input. We though that it might have been the GPU, since the monitors were plugged into it. Eventually, we find out that it's actually the CPU. I take it out, and alas, the pins are bent... My heart sank so far. I almost threw up at the sight of it. All that money just wasted. Since its been so many weeks since he bought the parts, there's no way we can get a refund on any of his parts. He's stuck with fully functional parts, minus a cpu. I even got an old AMD cpu and put it in. My old fx-6200 is not supported, though. So we couldn't get it to work.
So what I learned from this whole fiasco is that it's much better to save up a little bit more money to go with better parts that are easier to put together. I really hate that the AMD CPUs have the pins on them instead of the motherboard. I felt terribly for my friend, and I can't imagine what's going through his mind right now.