Post Your Biggest Cooling, PSU, & Case Mistakes

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
jpishgar

jpishgar

Splendid
Overlord Emeritus
Jan 5, 2010
5,931
117
26,640
• Buying a desk and a full tower case, and realizing after both are assembled that neither fit either.
• Over-applying thermal paste and spending hours trying to clean up the resulting mess with Q-tips and alcohol.
• Troubleshooting every component, from motherboard to CPU to RAM, re-seating and checking cables, jumper settings, connections, trying to figure out why the system won't boot, only to realize that the switch on the power supply is not turned "On". Don't lie, you've been there. Or at least, your own version of the above goofiness that you hope no one saw.

Now that you have my embarrassing confessions, let's hear yours.

We want to know what your biggest mistake building PCs has been as it relates to Cooling, Cases, or PSUs. What mishaps have you had that make you look back and go "Oh man, what the heck was I thinking?".

Consider this a no judgement zone - and a fun means of tech-related therapy.

Include images, if you've got 'em. If we get some good horror stories, we might even turn this into an editorial feature and showcase our communal misery.

-JP

p.s. Check out the other threads, too.
• Post Your Biggest CPUs Mistakes
• Post Your Biggest Graphics Card Mistakes
• Post Your Biggest Motherboard Mistakes
• Post your Biggest Storage Mistakes
• Post your Biggest Cooling, Cases, & PSUs Mistakes

 
My biggest mistake has been with the Intel pushpins on their coolers.

My first mistake arose when I did not realize that the arrows on the push-pins point in the direction to unlock and remove the cooler. I was under the thought that by turning the push-pins in the direction of the arrows it would lock the cooler into place, but that was not the case. So I had extremely high temperatures.

After addressing this problem, I still had high temperatures. I realized that two of them were still loose *ugh*. Sometimes 3 pushpins would align into the holes but the 4th just would not meet up. Finally after some time I managed to get a nice clean paste job and firmly secure the cooler, and lock it in place by using a screw driver to turn the push-pins opposite the arrows.
 
I tried to run a PSU fanlessly, I took off the cover, and later I'm too lazy to turn off the PC when work on other components, so I got shocked several times, I'm happy that another hand is on the metal case and grounded, so I didn;t break the PC, I was even fully conscious while being shocked, that just feel like an orgasm.
 
I installed my Hyper 212 Evo onto my brand new 4790K, and after experiencing very, very high temperatures and a few minor mental breakdowns, I realized the fan wasn't fully on the heatsink, it was off center. Whoops.
 
I used a Enermax liquid cooler on a server mobo that has pre-installed back plate. So I have to use the mount of the Cosair water coolers. But then I experienced a BURNING temperature and I soon realized that The cooper was not touching the CPU!
 
Well, the power switch on the PSU wasted a week of my time...then my friend pointed out.."hahaha you forgot that switch"
And I hope you can imagine what happened after that.........the whole class knew it
 
Hello everyone .
Well few months ago , I decided to clean my pc so i removed all of the components . Clean them with an air blower , changed the thermal paste and assembled the computer again but before doing the cable management , i decided to turn on the pc to see if it works fine . I connected the mobo , cpu , gpu power cables . pressed the power button and nothing happened .

What?????????????

Again i removed to mobo , ram , graphics card and tested them one by one on another pc. they were fine . So i assembled everything but i didn't put the computer in a case. used a screwdriver to turn it on and everything was fine, so i put everything in the case but before doing the cable management , decided to see if it turns on again . pressed the power button and nothing happened . I was in a "What ????It's impossible " moment . So i removed everything again and everything was ok and worked fine out of the case so i decided to put it in my case. this time i did the cable management first .
As my routine , the last step of cable management is connecting the front panel stuff . While i was connecting the f.panel cable , i realized that the last times , i didn't connect the f.panel cable and that was the reason that the power button didn't work and computer worked fine out of the case because i used a screwdriver to turn it on out of the case!!!!!!!
loool . I wasted 10 hours on assembling , unassuming and testing the components . only because of a tiny f.panel cable .

well that was my story . I hate front panel !!!!!
 
well this was some time ago, but I still remember when I built my first PC, I had a a6 6400k 4GB ram, and an ASUS A55BM-k motherboard. So I plugged everything in and it was fine. I was using the PSU that came with my case at the time(ik, kms) and then I did an out of box assemble, and plugged in the PSU, flipped the switch on, and ..... nothing happened. I was shocked and unhappy, so I had my dad buy me another PSU from local shopw, and that did not work either. until, I mean you guys probably caught it, I realized I forgot to power on with a screwdriver. and then, I had my dad return the PSU(it was a seasonic unit, Ikr, KMS again) and then I was using the PSU that came with the case for 3 months before that shorted out, and I got a cheap EVGA 400w unit. all this was when I was 11.
oh yea and I was repasting my GPU a week ago, and I took off the cooler. underneath was a mess of thermal paste, thankfully It wasn't conductive. then I cleaned everything, and got the old paste everywhere. took me extra time to clean. and plus, I ripped some of the thermal pads by accident.
and I was trying to get my cooler back on when I repasted my CPU, then I had trouble. so I took everything off. and then smeared paste on the sides of the CPU be accident, and then while I was trying to get that off, I I got some on the pins, and then got some in the sockt. thankfully its still working because I mean its non-conductive and non corrosive paste.
a case mistake would be choosing a cheap rosewill case. top mounted psu, no cable management, and I cut myself a couple of times. no offense to them. I like their more expensive cases though.
and my case now claims to be compatible with 160mm cooler and that's why have a H5, its 160mm tall, so when I installed it, the clips for the acrylic was blocking the cooler. meh
found some spelling erros in some manual, I forgot
 
So when i was first building my rig most of my pieces came but i was still waiting on the water-cooling parts. Just to make sure everything worked i hooked everything up and plugged the psu in and what not. Now i got a 5930k, so it doesn't come with a stock cooler. At the time i thought coolers were important but only necessary if you were going to use the computer for longer than just seeing if it POSTs. Turned on the PC with no cooler over the cpu, bios splash screen comes on, bios appears and tells me my CPU is at 90 degrees celsius, touch it with my knuckle, burned myself a little, and proceeded to panic like a deer in headlights and shut off my pc. My gamer buddies laughed so hard at me when i told them what I did.
 
Got a case only to realize the GPU won't fit in the PCI x16 slot as the HDD cage was obstructing it. Had to place it in the lower PCI x4 slot. Being my first build, I wanted everything to be perfect. There might not be much difference between the speeds in case of a GPU plugged in x16 or x4 slot, I just didn't want my new GPU to slowdown. So I took pliers, and bent the HDD cage inwards to make room for my GPU and it finally fit! Now my case just looks ugly, but speed is good 😛
 
My most recent big one was when putting together my water cooling loop about a six months ago, I bought an alphacool light tower reservoir and was using one of the ports as the drain port. Well I accidentally switched the drain port and the inlet since they are right next to each other and the fill port is actually the bottom whole, so after filling the loop and realizing the water wasn't flowing correctly and the drain tube was empty I realized I would just have to detach the tube that was filled with water to fix it. So water got everywear.

So my first mistake was a long time ago before cases were as nice as they are today and I was about 16 and my friend and I were building a system and we put the motherboard mounts in the case and installed everything and then the computer wouldn't boot and on the first attempt, something sparked. It turned out one of the mounts was in the wrong spot and was shorting two pins. thankfully all components survived.
 
I had two PSU's; one 1000W and another 1200W. I installed the 1000W and then mixed up the leads and used the leads from the wrong PSU. Burned out 2 GPU's before I discovered the problem. Fortunately they were old HD5850's.
 
On my second build I ever did I upgraded my CPU from a Pentium D to a Core 2 Quad 6700. I was nervous at the time to do watercooling so I stuck with air cooling. Still using a cheap case I only had an 80mm slot on the side and a 120mm slot on the back. I successfully overclocked the CPU to 3.0ghz from 2.67 GHz, but here's the issue. To compensate for limited fans for air cooling I bought a Thermaltake aftermarket cooler, "the copper seashell 92mm fan", 80mm Vantec Tornado case fan on the side "6000RPM". and a 3500 RPM Silverstone fan. PC was super loud as you could imagine, but after a couple days I noticed a loud banging noise inside my case.
Powered off the PC and pulled the side off to see that the air current between the two powerful fans and broken the CPU fan completely off and the noise was the electromagnet trying to spin the broken fan. I took the fan off the heatsink altogether and used it as a passive heatsink. Temps were actually cooler after that.
 
I wrestled with the back-plate for my liquid cooler for about a good hour, until I realized I had to flip the back-plate so I could fit it on my intel cooler. I didn't realize it said "This side for AMD, This side for Intel".
NOT fun at all.
 
My biggest mistake when I built my first PC (which was 4 PC's ago now, needless to say I learned from my many mistakes) was when I cheaped out on the motherboard and cpu cooler. I decided to get an i5 4th gen, locked, a GTX 760, 8gb of value ram (which was later upgraded), a decent 500w EVGA PSU, and some gigabyte low level 1150 mobo.

Well it went well for the first month. With the stock i5 cooler I was getting okay temps at idle and relatively concerning temps at load. The motherboard, thought I didn't know it at the time, was falling short of what I expected.

One day while I was playing a game (I forget which - probably skyrim, or a total war game), my PC just shut off entirely. I found later that the motherboard had been fried and therefore fried the CPU. My 760 died shortly thereafter (I assume it became fried, too, but over a longer period).

I replaced the i5 with the exact same model and kept the stock cooler. Around 6 months after that, I was playing a really demanding game. I wasn't keeping track of my temps (because I was a beginner at this whole thing - I mean the Xbox never overheated!) and the same thing happened, got a black screen. I feared it was the motherboard, which was worse because I upgraded to a nicer ASUS board. Turns out the CPU overheated because the cooling system was not on par.

Lesson learned, I started using a hyper 212 evo after that. Now on my fourth PC, I'm using an h110iGTX with an OC'd 8320. And yes, this time I didn't cheap out on the mobo or cooler
 
My biggest mistake was when i built my first pc (go figure) and built the whole thing, pressed the power button and nothing happened. So i completely took it all apart and rebuilt it. Still wouldn't power on, so i did a rma of the cpu, motherboard and gpu (this was my first pc dont laugh). While i was waiting on the cpu to get back i looked on the back of the psu, and saw the power switch i never flipped.
 
Installing 10th Performa, got deadset the backplate goes between CPU and tower. Scratched the cooper base deep enough to feel it.

Threw away a stock case PSU I broke and forgot to take out the aluminium blockes(planned to put em on power phases)

Case's wires are a pain in all important places. Blowing away dust and putting mobo back took longer than an hour
 
It all started buying from fresh tech (DONT!!) I got the pc turned it on then after a few minutes smoke came from the case and a burning plastic smell then I turned it off took it down and put on a massive wood table which is extremely safe to do by the way. Then I realised the wires were pushed against the side of the case and they had melted because of the heat from the psu. So I unplugged them crappy old fan cables I forgot name they are like plastic and have 3 pins, anyway and turned back on worked fine and waited until I had to spend £600 on new stuff. To sum it up DO NOT BUY FROM FRESHTECH HOWEVER GOOD THE PRICES ARE
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom