No, the standoffs were fine (I had to move one). Turns out this really old mid-tower case is kitted up for mATX mbs as well as full ATX, which surprised the hell out of me. I had a problem with the power led and internal alarm speaker plugs being too big to fit the mb front panel connectors, but I figured they are non-essential. When the system wouldn't power on at all I thought the front power switch was busted, and I tried shorting the pins but that didn't work either. Then I checked the PSU with a paper clip and it powered up, tried plugging and unplugging the main 24-pin atx power connector several times, thinking it wasn't seated properly (I was really afraid I'd shorted out the mb during assembly with a dropped screw or 3). I was at a loss when I remembered reading that the 4-pin cpu power plug worked in an 8-pin receptacle. There's no documentation on the 6-pin plug at the coolmax spec page (not even mentioned, just the 4, the 24 and assorted SATA and molex connectors), maybe it's for a GPU? Probly essay Win7 tomorrow. Took a while to figure out the freaky new UEFI bios. You have to spec 'legacy' for an mbr-formatted hdd, when I did that it booted into pre-installed Fedora no prob.
EDITED: 30 Mar 2018 22:48 by DSMITHHFX