Biggest PC Building Mistakes From The Community

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lol
 
my great computer mistake... hmmm was an new athlon slot a revision A with the 512kb cache 200mhz fsb on an abit ka7-100 raid board ran it for 3 months then decided to clean it out of dust after shutting down i reached back to shut the psu power button off before unplugging it, some how the switch was a bit difficult to flip but i managed to push it down with my fingernail. cleaned the dust out, plugged the computer back in hit the power button i hear a loud pop and acrid smoke smell and the power to the room went out, i open the case and inspect for damage and see some dark spots on the motherboard using a flash light, i go reset the room power breaker and inspect the case, i happen to notice the 115v switch is flipped to 230v, i pushed the wrong power switch and didn't cut power to the psu but changed the american to european voltage switch. i was so sad i almost cried as i fried my first server.
i never used another powmax psu after that even when they came free with the case.

a number of years ago i witnessed this youtube video, and i have to share it because it's the first thing i thought of when i saw this articles title.
How not to do watercooling... Unless you want to cause destruction of course 😉
Uploaded on Sep 6, 2011
The original vid is down. But we can't let this guy get away with this level of fail. -.- LULZ
https://youtu.be/Hj3Pte1xxdk
 
About 18 years ago during the windows 95-era, I decided to finally buy a SCSI CD-Recorder. Back then they were very very expensive and I was still in school, so it took me almost a year to find the money.

Unfortunately back then almost all power supplies were no-name crap and mine was a 250watt one with only 6 molex connectors. I already had 3 hard drives, 2 floppies and a CD-rom, so I was forced to buy a very cheap molex extension cable that gave me another 2 molex connectors. I didn't want to use that extension cable with my hard drives because I didn't have a lot of faith in it. Also back then back-ups where almost non-existent for me because I could only use floppies. So I plugged the extension cable to the CD-ROM and to my precious new CD-Recorder. I then tried to connect the cable to my PSU but I just couldn't do it. No matter how much force I applied it would't fit so I somehow convinced myself that I must connect it backwards even though the cables didn't mach (red to red and yellow to yellow). Unfortunately for me and my PC it worked without much force.

I didn't realise what I had done until I pressed the power switch. Smoke came from my PC and both my optical drives caught fire. OMG. I panicked and pulled the power plug in despair. Fortunately the fire didn't spread but my two optical drives were totally fried and I can still remember that awful smell that I couldn't get rid of for a whole week.

Amazingly after I cleaned up the mess and removed the 2 dead drives the PC did work again and my hard drives were OK but I had lost all USB ports. I had also fried my 2nd IDE channel, my floppy controller, my new SCSI controller and the PC was randomly crashing. Only serial ports were still working on that motherboard.

Unfortunately I was forced to live with that zombie PC for another whole year because I couldn't afford a new one. I only had to buy a new serial mouse and a new CD-Rom. When I finally got my new PC, I also bought a new CD-Recorder. Luckily for me the IDE CD-Recorders came to market that year dropping the prices a lot.

That was a very expensive mistake. Also I forgot to mention that inside my CD-Rom was my Win95 CD that literally melted. Ouch... After all those years it still hearts.
 
installing standoff scrwes( even the tomshardware request no boot page sais it was needed) and bitfenix neglecting to didnt say you dont need them.

fried my motherboard.

edit: case had raised bumps , i didnt knw that would matter .... anyways rmad it and got another one for free.
 
Before you laugh realize I did this just after watching 2 hours of video on how to build a pc, such a noob. I had a ancient HP pc running a pentium 4 300 series (or maybe that was the socket) I started taking it apart and like someone with ADD I saw a different heatsink and thought "OOO LAPTOP GRAPHICS CARD", I only then realized when I pulled of the passive heatsink and started to pry at the chip wondering why it wasn't coming off, I realized it was the northbridge. Sad face. I put everything back in order only to realize that the system post, then halfway through the bios it would get a defection error and shut down. That mobo when strait to the garbage can.
 
Back in the day i had an ASUS Geforce 3 Ti... and I couldn't quite get the overclock as high as I would have liked.
I read an article on the web these guys had uses caps/resistors soldered onto the video card to increase the voltage supplied to the GPU and the Memory. Hey, if they can do it with their expensive soldering rig, surely I can do it with a $5 soldering iron? Of course!!!
So, I went to Dick Smiths and got all of the caps/resistors I needed and promptly soldered them onto my shiny Geforce 3.... guess what? It didn't work after that!
So I went and got another set of caps/resistors, printed out the instructions I had followed and then send my video card back for RMA, with a letter explaining exactly what I had done (the caps/resistors were still hanging off the card), with a request that they replace the card and use the spare caps/resistors and instructions to apply the hack to the replacement card.
It wasn't until AFTER I had sent this away that I realised how stupid I was.
Luckily, ASUS is a great company and replaced the card anyway. Unfortunately they didn't use the supplied caps/resistors to hack it for me.
 
Once had a customer who brought his PC for repair claiming that his brand-new CD-ROM is not working. Turned out it worked as a charm - the "problem" was the customer who was trying to insert a CD between the 5.25" drive bays, directly into the case! In his defense, the case had visible gaps between drive bays :) We could not stop laughing for days :)
 
I never made a mistake while building a PC, but I did make 2 mistakes upgrading one.

The first is pretty boring. I wanted to add more RAM and bought modules that didn't fit in my PC.

The second is slightly more entertaining. I wanted to replace the stock CPU cooler with a better one from Zalman. I had to unscrew the previous cooler mounting rack to install the new one which used pins instead of screws.
I had to use quite a bit of force to push the pins. My mainboard was bending, and I got cold feet, so I stopped when I thought I had pushed the pins "deep enough".
I turned on my PC and noticed that the performance had dropped sharply. After a while of gaming, I heard a loud *thud* noise and a few seconds later my PC shut down.
I opened the case again and saw that the CPU cooler had fallen onto the GPU. I had not pushed the pins deep enough after all. After I fixed that mistake, everything was running fine again. I'm surprised the GPU survived a 3 kg copper block landing on it.
 
Ill drop in my two cents:
I tried to overclock two 6600GT (Nvidias) in SLI with an Athlon X64 with a PSU of 430W... 130 of that in the 5V rail.
It was because I wanted to play Crysis on something higher than 800x600 on low details.

It was a glorious 10 minutes of gameplay.
 
As a kid I was raised to keep everything clean and tidy. I was horrified to find that there is a lot of dust in my computer when I opened it to install extra RAM. I used vacuum cleaner and sucked every bit of dust. But after cleaning, the computer did not boot. Father had to take it to a service, where they found that the vacuum cleaner pulled the CPU (i485SX2) out of the socket.
 
Killed a 486-33 CPU sitting in a famous Vobis computer (German PC retail store that helped make PCs mainstream at the time) due to bent pins just out of curiosity - wanted to test whether a 486-66 CPU I had access to would work in the machine since I had understood that the -66 would just clock higher "internally". Well with the pins destroyed / broken off while trying to bent them back with a screw driver that test became a question of life and death.

Well, it did work like a charm for a long time until retirement of the whole rig and the teen I was was quite happy and
relieved...

Lesson learned: Never broke a component again in the 20+ years of building rigs afterwards.
 
Not a big mistake, but I had an ASUS DCUII GTX580, triple slot card. Saw another on ebay for a very reasonable sum, and bought it. I had forgotten that my motherboard was designed for Tri-SLI (which wasn't a feature I particularly wanted, but the rest of the motherboard was great), so all the PCIe x16 slots were only two slots apart. The lowest slot was unusable because the card would run into the bottom of the case. Tested the the ebay card, all good, put it back in its box.

A 'minor' upgrade some weeks later, new CPU, motherboard, and ram, case. Cards installed, everything works. Ten minutes into the first game and a display driver crash. Then a few random restarts and blue screens over the next hour.

After turning on some temperature logging. As it happens two triple slot cards tightly packed means zero airflow to the card on top. And while completely fine at idle and light loads, a complete disaster as soon as you wanted to do anything serious. I experimented with the equipment at hand. Step one, remove shrouds, a minor improvement actually. Added some fans, no effect (seems the fans on the card create a massive air pocket that is impenetrable to air flow from the side or rear, as that is where it is effectively exhausting. Just recirculates the heated air endlessly.

Some weeks later, and some all-in-one adapters from Arctic. Success! Spent more on getting those cards to work then an entire system would have cost. Though to be fair I would have bought the CPU/MB/Ram and case anyway.

Wonderful journey though, got to tinker with that machine for quite some time.

I can't recall any other major disasters throughout the years, aside from cheap power supplies being the only option back in the day. Since there weren't any decent PC stores or chains in the mid-west until after the internet took off.

I did once put together a completely non-functional machine with fully functional and supposedly compatible parts. I could manage an OS for about two days before corruption (Win 2K won that shootout). Sold off the parts to my friends, and no one had issues. The computer right after that was the first 'top of the line because I am tired of dealing with this' machine, ended up with the Athlon XP 1800 the day/weekend it came out. (When men were real men and drove in-person to computer shows to haggle with 'off the truck' salesmen)
 
I hear you. Had similar experience with GTX680 in SLI. At least the cards fit well in my Mobo, but temps, well, not so well. Ended with one Arctic accelero II on one and an Arctic Hydro on the other (where the pump was noisier than anything else in the system combined). Was just for getting it done at the time, cause my favorite game, of course, didn't work yet in SLI... when it finally did the GRX680 even in SLI was way past its prime.
 
I haven't had any big mistakes aside from dropping accidentally HDDs.

But my friend had a very bad situation.

Back in 2007, I was returning from my local University, when I receive a call from my friend. He is quite intelligent but just about a year ago from that date he had seen a PC for the first time, and I helped him to understand a lot of things about computers and I built him and 939 Athlon 64 for personal use, he had not make any real mistake until that day. The day before we were talking about the importance of keeping the internals of the PC clean and the intervals of cleaning, but I never thought he would try to attempt to do it himself without any help.

Back to the call, he tell me that his CPU had some bent pins and if that make the PC unable to run, I'm really confused and ask him:
"How the hell are you able to see that your CPU has bent pins? What are you doing!?"

He says, "Oh, I'm just cleaning the PC and took out the heat sink to clean it and saw that the CPU has bent pins, but I straightened them out, don't worry. But the strange thing is that I couldn't separate the cooler from the CPU"

I was quite shocked, but ask him, "Did you put it back again without separating them?"

He tell me, "Yes, I put it back after straightening the pins but the PC doesn't turn on"

The story was much more complicated, but told him to not touch anything more disconnect the CPU and wait for me to check it.

In the end he just managed, damage the Motherboard socket pins, he even managed to half repair it but it never got into windows, we ordered a new one anyway.

For bad luck, next week after the rebuild, a lightning killed his new mobo, so he got a cheap one this time, and that combination worked for many years before selling it.
 
The day of the lightning was hilarious, I saw the lightning from my house, and just as a joke I called him and asked if hi PC was ok, but he was all panicked because the lightning actually hit a tree that was beside his house, and when he checked his PC didn't start along with his fridge lol.

At least he will never know that his secondary drive actually died because I accidentally dropped and not because of the lightning... Oops!
 
I wish my story was posted here..

Awhile back the company I was working for ordered a few different power supplies for some new programming computers. Overtime, the modular cables got mixed together and well, they all looked the same. So, a few weeks after building the last PC we were refurbishing another. The power supply on the old computer was also modular and I figured the other modular cables from the newer computers would work without issue. I install the new CPU, GPU, etc and I finally get to the storage. I plug everything in, power it on... and well.. The SSD starts to smoke, really, really bad.. a few sparks started up as well. It turns out that the cables weren't compatible and I basically shorted out the SSD. The boss got a good laugh out of it thankfully and we ordered up a new one! Thankfully the other components were not harmed! :)

TL;DR - Don't mix up modular power supply cables from previous builds with your new ones (unless they are 100% compatible of course)!
 
And sometimes the PC will bite you back...

I had an older PC that was making a lot of noise (I think it was a Pentium IV) As per recommendations I went to stop each of the fans in the case to see if the noise went down. But instead of fishing for a pencil I used my finger. The case fans stopped easily enough.
But the aftermarket CPU fan was spinning so fast and so string it REMOVED about 2mm off the front of my finger (ouch). So I went for a band-aid with a much better understanding of WHY the article said to use a pencil
 

I haven't stuck my finger in a fan with blades sharp enough to scalp fingers but I have accidentally stuck my finger in a CPU fan that forward-swept blades ending in sharp tips. The tip did dig itself in a few millimeters deep before the blade broke and the fan stopped. That was mildly painful, but not as unpleasant as having to pry the wound open to flush the dust and other junk out of there.
 
My biggest mistake was believing launch dates from manufacturers, AMD and Noctua, and basing my builds on these. One build delayed for one year, the other, after several years, still waiting for the parts, supposed to be launched "sometime soon." The latter build is still useable, of course, just not finished as intended.
 
I took apart my 570 GTX for cleaning, but apparently the solder joints between he copper plate and the aluminum cooler were bad and it snapped apart. I didn't want to buy a new card or RMA it, so I took some super glue and thermal adhesive cement and put it back together. I expected the cooling performance to suffer without solder joints, but it was cooling around 20 degrees better at full usage.

Still works today.
 


thats not a fail thats an epic win.
 
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