Signs of a broken pcie slot ?

[Overbuilder]

Hello everybody, Today i switched on my computer and started working and then all of a sudden with a word document open the screen went black. I thought that it was probably a windows failure but then smelt that familiar electrical smoke and realized that it was a lot worse than i had initially hoped. I first thought of switching out my gpu (instead of a gt 610 i installed a hd 6450) ,and i saw the bios screen appear so thought yay it's just my gpu's time to go to the gpu afterlife, but then unfortunately at the sign- in screen, the screen went blank. I tried rebooting, and this time the bios screen did't even appear. Swapped the gpu for a gt 710 i had laying around, and i saw the bios ''watermark so i attempted to boot into the bios. '' I know it succeeded in booting into the bios as it beeps when it does this. However, again no screen. I cannot test whether it is in fact the pcie slot as it's a mitx board ( only a single pcie x 16 ) and so all this has lead me to believe that it is power delivery failure from the pcie slot ( these gpus get all their power from the slot, i have no decent gpus to test with ), as when something more intensive comes up on the screen like the bios menu or when i press the space bar wen it loaded into windows to sign in and it does the animation where the clock goes from the bottom to the top of the screen. Thoughts ?

[bmx6454]

you mentioned a burning smell, there may be visible signs of damage in that case. i would examine around the pci slot and look for physical damage to confirm motherboard fault.