Post Your Biggest Cooling, PSU, & Case Mistakes

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Buying an Abit IC7 Max 3 Mobo. Damn it was expensive. Believing the hype. Never again. As far as cases and power supplies - Definitely Choosing Corsair. CX750-M was absolute crap. Scratched the hell out of Corsair Carbide 600C case installing new Thermaltake Toughpower 850W Gold. At least the new psu works fine. 😉
 
In the first PC I built (Celeron 433mhz @488mhz, TnT2 32mb) I made two pretty major mistakes:

When I was first setting it up I noticed there was a port in the back of the CD drive for an audio connector, I found a loose cable that fit and plugged it in. When I went to boot the computer there was a massive puff of smoke and I immediately pulled the plug, afterwards I inspected the PC, freaking out that I had just totaled the PC I poured my lifes savings into, and noticed that the one of the wires of the "audio cable" I had plugged into the CD drive had completely melted off all the plastic coating and when I traced it back to it's source I realized it actually came directly from the PSU :O. I decided to tape up the now exposed wire, disconnect it from the CD drive and try to boot the PC again to see how much damage I had done, to my absolute amazement it booted up without any problems, and even more astonishing was that even the CD drive was working perfectly, the total sum of the damage was the plastic coating on a wire, man I felt lucky that day.

The other mistake I made was about two years later, the fans on TNT2 video card were acting up so I decided to pull it out and clean it. It was caked in dust, but the way the heat sink was affixed to the PCB was blocking my access to clean things properly so I unscrewed the heat sink and separated it from the PCB, to my horror there was this white goop between the heat sink and the GPU, so I figured I'd clean that off too as I didn't want it to get in the way of the thermal conductivity between the GPU and heat sink. It wasn't till years later when I performed my first after market CPU cooler installation that I realized the white goop had been a thermal compound, but again I had got lucky and the GPU had performed without issue 😀.

Since getting the internet I haven't made any more mistakes, I've learned to fully research what I am doing before going in and messing with my hardware.
 
When I upgraded to my new motherboard earlier this January, I ran out of standoffs, so I substituted a piece of cardboard to support my motherboard when I connected the power cable to ensure that my motherboard wouldn't snap. However, I didn't think it through that well and to this day, that same piece of cardboard is still stuck behind the motherboard.
 
I might add that purchasing the Corsair 600C case was a mistake as well. Although this case is somewhat attractive, it lacks durability. Man I miss my old Lian Li case!
 
Uninstalled my heatsink because I thought I didn't have room to change out the exhaust fan in a smaller case. Realized there was room but from the side instead of top. So I reinstalled heatsink for nothing, wasting my time
 
Sanding and painting my full sized tower. i don't think the finished work was a mistake at all, I really enjoy the end look and it was a good learning experience.

The mistake I made was trying to tackle the job without having all the correct tools. Never try to sand down a computer case by hand...never. I spent 4 hours (yes, 4...4 hours) sanding one side panel on the full tower down to bear metal. My hands and arms hurt the next day.

I said forget this and went to my step-dad's and borrowed a power sander. Sanding the remaining parts of the tower only took about 45 minutes. I could have saved so much time if I started with a power sander over doing it by hand.

Painting - I'd have to rig up some way to suspend the items when using spray paint. Doing so would have cut my painting time in half. I had to lean pieces against cardboard, spray paint one side (multiple coats, always multiple coats of primer and paint) and wait for it to dry. Then turn the piece over and repeat. It was more tedious than I liked.
 
On my first build I set my side panel next to my desk in our A+ class. The assistant teacher stepped on it smashing the mounting tabs and warping the whole panel. Always set your side panels in a safe place!

Another student in our class spent some ungodly amount on his PC (for the time and as a high school student, most of the class averaged $800, he was well over 1500 probably pushing 2k) he used the entire tube of AS5 on his processor. Started the PC which immediately let out a prolonged beep and smoke. Why did he use so much? because that was how much was in the tube. "why would they sell you 3.5g if you aren't supposed to use all 3.5g?" To add insult to injury after everything was cleaned up he didn't have any paste left to reinstall the cpu cooler and test to see if he had fried anything.

On my latest build I went to replace the stock cpu cooler because I had been seeing high temps. When I went to remove the stock cooler I found that it was hanging on by the bottom two pins only. thus the high temps. The AS5 had melted down to one side and the IHS was exposed. Once I saw the root cause of my high temps I think I stared at it for a couple minutes in absolute shock, before I tossed it and installed my new CPU cooler. I hate twisty push pins!
 
I forgot to buy thermal compound when I made some major changes to my system, but I just couldn't bear waiting for the thermal paste to arrive, so I tried putting on my Corsair H110i onto my 4770k without thermal compound. My system overheated after the first second for booting up. I was so scared that I had fried to cpu, but luckily it still worked fine after the thermal compound arrived. #CookingWithIntel
 
Buying a "Viotek" 850w psu for a xeon and a 780 ti boost rig. Don't even bother calling me dumb and if you don't know viotek PSUs suck under load.
 


I dont understand how it would overheat that quickly, i had a 4690k running for about 10 minutes in my bios before temps started to get iffy
 


I left the old thermal paste on, which probably formed air bubbles inbetween the two metals.
 
My biggest mistake was buying a cheap case for my very first PC build. Never again. It literally fell apart and the power button broke under very light use. I learned a lot from that build, the best lesson was to not skimp on the PSU. The second was don't skimp on the case.

Here it is! http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/treasures-trash,1260-15.html it was on toms. It falls squarely into the trash category if you are curious.
 
Well I have built 3 PC's now going on my 4th soon but on my first build, I bought a FX-6300 (two actually, I'll explain later) and I installed it on to my cheap budget ASUS Mobo but the first time I installed it, (it was my first CPU installation) I was unaware that you don't have to forcefully shove the pins into place. (I now know you can basically drop them into place.) So as you can imagine, I could not get the CPU to fit properly. As a young boy, I thought "What always makes something go into place?"--- "Pushing it harder!" Later, my tech-savvy mother came downstairs and I told her about the incident. She looked at the of the CPU to see it covered in thermal paste and looked at the bottom to see about half of the pins completely broken off. I learned from that, ordered the same processor and very carefully installed it.

Another dumb mistake is when I received my GPU for this same build, (GTX 960 2GB) I was extremely excited to install it. At the time, I was using a very old (like 2008) PSU and when I went to plug in the PCIE cable from my power supply, I discovered that the 6+2 cable I needed was in fact nonexistent on that power supply! I spent days Amazon searching and calling companies to end up finding no adapter or extra cable that could fix my issue, so I had to buy a new EVGA PSU, which was a great one for my first build. To be honest, this wasn't much of a fail in my opinion because I reaaaally needed a PSU from this century. Either way, since these mistakes I have sure been doing my homework any time I install something I have never done before.
 
I broke so many intel's stock fan locking mechanism for my client PCs at my cybercafe, only few survived my atrocities...
Then I bought so many Zalman's CNPS2X to make up for it.
 
Not upgrading (Read whole new system) my Pentium 233mhz sooner than 2 months after getting it in 2002...

Really though, I have been a mix of lucky and meticulously (obnoxiously) researching about what I'm doing/wanting to do that I don't have many horror stories. I suppose the worst was thinking my mobo was bricked when it was a dead gpu. No onboard, no second card. It's silly, but I got a new rig and I upgraded my mom's pc with my working parts and her gpu.
 
Ive got one, how about having your aio liquid cooler not on the cpu and turning it on about 10 times before realizing that the cooler is not making contact. NEARLY CRAPPED MY SELF THINKING THAT THE PC I WAS BORROWING WAS SCREWED
 


LoL! Did you really just respond to a spam bot?
 


I know lol
 
I had a 386-25 with a Cyrix mathco - the real expensive kind. I was doing some heavy electronics simulations at the time.
A friend of mine had never seen the legendary Cyrix chip before. So he pulls it out, looks it over and puts it back in.
As you can guess, it was dead.
 
ok so i look back over the years now and I have 3 extreme fails and this is what not to do with a computer or hardware.

Extreme fail number one:

at the age of 13 acquired a 486 DX 33Mhz as a Christmas present.......fantastic!.........even came with Doom on from one of my dad's friend. so it was about 6pm after along day of killing zombie marines and imps I thought id have a break. in the meantime my brother went to have a go and was generally looking about the computer base and pointed out the "TURBO" switch on the back! OMG this thing can even go faster than it already is!! without a second thought the little switch gets moved and BANG we have hit hyper speed!! well it went bang......so it seems the "TURBO" switch my brother found was to change it 240v to 110v............epic fail..........

Extreme fail number two:

so a few year have past and I now know not to touch the "TURBO" button on the back of the PSU or take direction from my brother......so we now enter the world of Overclocking! woooo K6-2 500 Jet way motherboard.........max CPU clock speed 550..........so a modest 10% increase...well happy with myself at this point but hold on......I simply can not continue at this neck breaking speed without extra cooling! now that would be an epic fail....im not some kind of fool!! introducing the new 60mm fan that would even keep you cool in the middle of the Sahara....during the day! oh yes so first thing I need to do it cut a hold in the back of the case! 3hrs later done........(I'm 15 at this point my dad has left so no tools in the house the closest thing we had to a tool was my brother "turbo man"). anyway I fit the fan go to power up (had to put extra layers of clothing on at this point due to the extreme tempters I would be facing) and......flashback to the Christmas of doom......BANG......metal shavings covered the computers MB shorted out.......no more pc........Brother got the blame.

Extreme fail number Three:

so a bit more time has past I now know there are no such things as "turbo" switches on PSU's and how not to add extra cooling to your K6-2 500........we have moved on to the Duron 800 (EPIC).........again overclocking is the "in" thing and these bad boys are what to have.......(when you are poor and can not afford Pentiums). back in the day you could "unlock" the Level 2 cache on chip by joining the bridges together with the carbon from a pencil or so I was told.......so a quick look up on the internet.........once again hitting warp speed on my 56k dial up........so two days later the article loads and YES it is true....so out with the pencil case off with the pc and with chip in hand I extremely carefully colour in the full cpu with my school pencil even stopping to sharpen it..........and looking all smug after thinking I have magically transformed my Duron 800 into a Pentium 900000000 I proceed to set it back in its home and power it on! shouting my brother in at this point to gloat about my incredibly scientific way of unlocking the raw power that was hiding for all this time right under my nose! and we hit the power button.....we have lift off! we have......BSOD......we have an epic fail.........so with "turbo man" thinking this is amusing decides I'm a fool and advises me to take the Duron out again and clean it off! at this point he does seem to have a good idea, lets put it back to how it was. so 5 minutes later cpu in hand I decide the carbon needs to come off how stupid I must of been to think this would work........so I start to try and clean it off its not moving its now become one with the CPU, so back in the room comes Gandalf (the brother) with the carbons worst nightmare...........a rubber...........OMG why did I not think of that! simple physics rubbers remove pencil marks! so here I go rubbing the carbon off thinking all's well that ends well....until I realised I rubbed off the carbon and most of the CPU's capacitors.
 


Looking a your profile pic and stuff, are you a Linkin Park fan?

 


Yep.
 


could you get your money back from whoever made you motherboard for the cost of the mobo, cpu and graphics card?
 
Placing your ram on top of your graphics card when your refilling your watercooling loop, after which checking if the system posts. Ram dead, now down to 4 gigs
 
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