Biggest PC Building Mistakes From The Community

[IInuyasha74]

Tom’s Hardware staffers and community members share the stories behind their biggest PC building mistakes (and the components fried as a result).

Biggest PC Building Mistakes From The Community : Read more

 

[dudmont]

My biggest mistake is simple. Getting a new 780ti, I was excited to get it in and up and running. I forgot to unlatch the old video card, I managed to pull the whole slot out of the system, before I realized my mistake.. Long story short, I had to trim every little connection wire, down to nothing, to avoid a short. Thankfully, I have a board that has a plx chip, and allows me to run my now SLI setup with no problems.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Haha, funny stuff.

 

[InvalidError]

I do not remember frying PC components from a mistake or anything else of that magnitude, but I did fry some electronic components in my college years by using an old PC power supply to power projects. I had (and still have) the bad habit of modifying live circuits and the power supply, which means occasional shorts between power and ground, and the PSU I used back then could spike to 15-20V on the 5V rail after coming out of a short circuit. No over-current/over-voltage protection rubbish there! Glad I never attempted to use that power supply in a PC before discovering that.

I have accidentally shorted the PSU in my PCs many times while cleaning them or opening them for whatever reasons, never had a component die from it. Maybe I have just been lucky for the past 20 years.

 

[g-unit1111]

When I was building my White Knight PC, I wanted to use liquid cooling and my first foray into that was an utter disaster. After multiple trips to Micro Center and over $80 spent on technical support, I found out that I didn't use all of the standoffs and the motherboard shorted. And then the NZXT Kraken X61 I was using at the time caused unstable CPU temperatures and I finally wound up ditching the Kraken for a Noctua D14 and have been problem free ever since. Needless to say I won't be making that mistake again. :lol:

 

[coolitic]

Accidentally plugged in my laptops video card with the power cable still connected.

Now it's stuck on integrated gfx (thankfully I built my desktop not long later)

 

[turbotong]

Why isn't the 4chan triforce PC story on here?

 

[CRIES78]

About 20 years ago I tried to help a friend upgrade his parents new P5 computer to increase the memory. Little did I know that you needed to insert memory with gold pins into a memory slot with gold pins. (or Tin to tin). Don't ever mix the two. I was 16 at the time and am still living down the shame from destroying their computer.

 

[Dkstrider]

So my father plays a lot on his pc and I wanted to help him upgrade his completely useless graphics card. I bring him my old 580gtx and a new PSU, hook everything up and power it on. Can't get the 580gtx to work, it didn't survive the transfer from house to house. Take the 580gtx out. Well, when I leave that friday night my father decides saturday morning - since I'm not using the 580 I'll just put my old power supply back in since it worked fine and give my son his back. Well, he didn't swap the cables out and proceeded to fry 3 solid state hard drives and 3 disk drives. What makes this even more unbelievable is my father helped invent the KVM switch, a highly regarded computer engineer in the community, who fried a decade worth of hard drives

 

[mrjhh]

My first 80386 build was done on the cheap. I had an old 8086 computer, and tried to use the original video card from that in the 80386, but the system wouldn't stay up long. I returned it to the place I bought it for repair, but they couldn't fix it. I eventually bit the bullet and upgraded the video card to a 16-bit card, and it started working.

 

[Nuckles_56]

My biggest mistake was when I was building my uncle's machine, I managed to put the bluray drive upside down when I installed it and didn't notice until I went to put the Windows disk in and it didn't want to open. I managed to completely screw up the disk drive by doing that so I had to buy him a new one.

 

[jasonf2]

Back in the floppy drive days I was contracted to build about a half dozen machines. My friend wanted to learn to build machines and helped me assemble them. After a machine or two being assembled he decided to have a go at it. I checked his work and everything was plugged in where it was supposed to go. When we applied power smoke started pouring out of the floppy drive. It seems that the dummy plug on an old floppy drive could be reversed, somehow. Needless to say I put the rest of the machines together myself.

 

[TeamColeINC]

My mistake on my first (and current) rig was that my 24-pin connector wasnt fully seated in the motherboard at first and my 1200W PSU was running really hot. Didnt realize it until after about a month and kinda hurt myself from the epic face-palm I gave myself afterwards lol.

 

[B16CXHatch]

So, some kid is probably gonna have a story after what happened today at work (retail store that also works on computers but not Best Buy). Basically, this older guy's computer "died". He thinks lightning got it. As are many other people who say that, he was wrong. It powers on just fine. His grandson, however made the correct diagnosis that his hard drive was dead. He did not apply the correct treatment though.

He tells me he bought a hard drive from somewhere, and his grandson tried to replace it. He said he just couldn't get it to work, assumed the computer was shot, and returned the drive. He still wanted a second opinion though so he brought it to us. I open it up real quick for an inspection and the kid had left all the crap in there loose and unhooked. I put it back together and fired it up. An awful screech came from the hard drive but the Dell logo came up fine. So I powered it off, unhooked the hard drive, and plugged in a Windows flash drive. I pulled up the boot menu and it booted from the flash drive fine. I went to get a new WD Blue from the back and slapped it in. It installed Windows 8.1 fine except when it rebooted, a weird screen that looked like the initial screen you see when you try to boot from an XP or 2K disc came up. Can you see where this is going? It BSOD'd. I went in the UEFI and saw that Secure Boot had been disabled and it had been set to legacy mode with DVD drive as first boot.

Oh, it can't be. Can it?...... I popped the DVD drive and yep. Windows XP disc sitting in the tray. I need to have a talk with this guy's grandson. So, I restore the UEFI's defaults and install Windows 8.1 again and now the thing is installing a crap load of updates and drivers like a champ.

 

[Agam3mn0n]

Back in the late 90's I worked in a computer store that specialised in custom builds and serving a community of PC fanatics. We had a reputation for delivering good work at fair prices that appealed beyond the hardcore PC Fan so that we would get some corporate customers and/or average PC owners who also want some upgrade work done to their machines but didn't have the confidence to deal with it themselves.

One customer dropped a PC in that he wanted a Voodoo III installed. We had a simple policy at the time that required the customer to be present when we powered up any machine for that kind of work, so that both the customer and the engineers know whether everything is working before we start work.

One of the store people took the PC to the service desk and hooked it up and powered it up, it started fine and the device manager didn't indicate any problems or missing device drivers. The customer left and the same store person went back to the machine, as he was sitting down he had put his left hand on a metal railing of the workdesk, and he put his right hand on top of the case (an upright tower powder coated in a horrible beige) but his fingers touched the back and that's when he let out an incredible scream and was sent flying to the floor.

The case was live. He was knocked off his feet and lucky to be alive In those days most PC's required an earthing cable to be attached to the case. On closer inspection the earthing cable in this PC was dangling below the floppy drive bay. Incredibly the extremely lucky customer had been using it for a year.

 

[InvalidError]

In those days most PC's required an earthing cable to be attached to the case.

I personally do not remember seeing ground straps even inside XT-era (8088) PCs, all grounded through the PSU's mounting screws and connected loads.

Many electrical codes require non-structural ground connections, which makes ground straps between the PSU and chassis still technically required today. This is rarely an issue since the PSU usually has multiple redundant ground connections to PC chassis aside from its four mounting screws and related structures through all the peripherals screwed to the case, such as motherboards' brass stand-offs, add-in-boards' IO brackets, connector shells through the IO shield, HDD/ODD body, etc. since devices link their body/shell to electrical ground for EMI reasons.

 

[JoshuaNunez]

Mine isn't as bad as some of these but me and my friend still have a laugh about it. I was building a pc for the first time and I didn't realize that the 20 and the 4 pin connector on the 24 pin connector was supposed to be plugged in together. I plugged in the 20 pin first and then couldn't plug the 4 pin in. I literally spent half an hour trying to pull the 20 pin out. I even went as far as trying to force it out with the tip of my screwdriver. Losing my cool doesn't even begin to describe. It was Basically like trying to pull two slippery lego bricks apart times 1000. My friend was on the other end of skype on my laptop and he had to sit through half an hour of me screaming at my 20 pin connector. Probably gasping for air due to laughter. Turns out all I had to do was squeeze the sides and slide it out. Took me six hours to build it that night. Well worth the struggle though because it was my first PC but definitely not gonna be my last. Also because I had Costco pizza afterwards.

 

[redgarl]

I had a Big Water system for my Athlon 64. The thing was working pretty well for a couple of years. I upgraded my system to a Core 2 Duo. The bad thing with copper base Heat Sink is that they corrode with water overtime... big time. Basically a drop felt on my 8800 GTX. Card was DOA.

Lessons learned, watercooling is a fad that only cost more for more trouble... and buy aluminium base heat sink watercooling blocks. It can be an hybrid, however cooper should never be in contact with liquids, period.

 

[samthing]

Motherboard: Built a basic cheap rig for friend using mostly my old components, everything was put together correctly but it wouldn't boot, fans spinned for a second and then nothing. Spent an hour unplugging and replugging stuff. Then I connected the case fans into the motherboard headers instead of direct PSU molex and the damn thing booted like nothing. And yes, CPU fan was plugged into the motherboard all the time. Even tried unplugging the case fans from motherboard and again it wouldn't boot until they were plugged.

GPU: I had ordered new PSU and X1800XT to beef up my Athlon 64 rig, problem was that the GPU arrived before the PSU. I was too anxious to wait and decided to test the new GPU with my old HEC 350W PSU. After 10 minutes of F.E.A.R. artifacts appeared on screen and whole computer locked seconds after. Had to RMA the fried card.

Storage: Friend's external HDD kept going bad, I think he RMA'd it two or three times. At some point I realized to ask where he was keeping it, answer was on top of a big subwoofer.

***

I made the mistake of trying to use hardware RAID 0 on fresh pair of Intel SSDs when SSDs were just appearing on consumer market. I spent hours googling for drivers that would let Windows install recognize the array. Crazy enough the drivers that worked were from another MB manufacturer.

***

I was finishing computer build, was about to close the case and already had Windows almost done installing when I noticed I hadn't plugged the power cable to one of the storage HDDs. Figuring that it was sata drive I thought I could just hot plug it, but the computer rebooted. Thankfully only casualty was the unusable Windows installation.

 

[gergguy]

Years ago, a friend of mine got some parts from a local PC store. They explained to him how to assemble them (I wasn't there, so I don't know how the conversation went). I was a new Tech at the time so I decided to check out his work.

Back then cpu's had pins on the outer edge on the bottom of the cpu. My friend had applied thermal paste to the back side of the CPU (not between the heat sink and the cpu) UNDER the cpu between the pins. I couldn't stop laughing.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Years ago, a friend of mine got some parts from a local PC store. They explained to him how to assemble them (I wasn't there, so I don't know how the conversation went). I was a new Tech at the time so I decided to check out his work.

Back then cpu's had pins on the outer edge on the bottom of the cpu. My friend had applied thermal paste to the back side of the CPU (not between the heat sink and the cpu) UNDER the cpu between the pins. I couldn't stop laughing.

Ha! That's a good one.

 

[cmi86]

This was many years ago and I can't remeber exactly why i was digging around in the case while my rig was on but i ended up catching my finger in my rear exhaust fan and broke off a few blades. The shock of this caused me to jerk my hand back and backhand the cpu cooler knocking it off, breaking the bracket, overheating the cpu and cutting my hand pretty good.. Good thing it was AM3+ so i just replaced the 1 mount bracket with an extra and threw a new fan in and all was well. Learned my lesson for sure.

 

[kunstderfugue]

Oh this one time there was this big ball of dust inside my power supply so I straightened up a clip and attempted to remove it with said piece of metal. Boom went the PSU, with smoke and everything; I had shorted tmo pieces of solder on the bock of the mainboard. It still works to this day but it's not in my main rig anymore.

 

[SSBrando]

About 11 years ago in high school I could have potentially 'killed' my friend Chris in our A+ class. That day's lab was using an ohm meter to test the voltages running through the P1 connector and writing down which color read what. This power supply had dark blue and black wires and we couldn't see so Chris sticks his head in closer to examine the wires and meanwhile my hand holding one of the meter's prongs was drifting into the power supply vent. It must have touched a capacitor because a great light sparked. I saw the color purple, Chris' head reported blue after throwing himself back into his chair (the fearful kind not electric kind) and our 3rd member Russell saw green. It popped loud enough that our teacher came over wondering why we had such awestruck faces.

Also, same class, Chris and I were putting together one good computer out of a 'junkyard' of old pentium pro and pentium 2 school computers. We needed a different BIOS chip (the old rectangular ones with what, 16 pins) and swapped it out not paying attention to key orientation. Start up the computer and *sniff sniff* what's that smell? Smells like electronics when they get too hot from electricity smell. Since the BIOS weren't posting, turned off the PC, open it back up, touch the BIOS to remove it and Burn! Hot! Then Chris realized we probably put it in upside down and just then the bell was ringing so we left it.

 

[mitch074]

I made 2 major mistakes on my first motherboard (a Suttle 430TX-based one): the first was a SDRAM stick that did manage to fit and click into the safety locks, but was actually reversed. Sparks, smoke... The motherboard survived (though one of its 2 SDRAM slots was now unusable), the 64MB SDRAM stick didn't though. RMA did work. Whew!

Second: same motherboard, troubles with the CD drive: it wouldn't boot with it straight away, I had to power it on then reset it a couple seconds later. I tried flashing the latest version of the BIOS... It failed right in the middle, as the utility I was using for that was too old. Luckily, my brother had the same mobo at the time and Flash ROM chips were usually plugged in. So, we performed the delicate operation of taking out both ROM chips, booting my mobo with his ROM chip (and making sure ROM Shadow was on), removing the chip WITH THE COMPUTER ON, plugging back the faulty chip WITH THE COMPUTER STILL ON, and then I flashed the proper BIOS image with the latest version of the utility. And it worked. Re-Whew!!!