Post Your Biggest Graphics Card Mistakes

Page 3 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Oho man, this is a good one coming from a gamer.

So my current tower has a 200mm grated opening for a 200mm fan. It was on the right side of my desk in an open area. I left a monster energy drink on the right side of my table...
You can tell how this ends out.
Well, it was interesting actually.

I was watching an epic movie, and I was replicating the moves of the heroes like a total geek. Without realizing for a few seconds, I hit my monster hard enough for it to knock straight onto the grated part of my tower.
When I realized it, I panicked, screamed a little, and then took the drink off of its new-found coaster.. half empty.

I panicked further, and ripped open my case to immediately inspect the water damage...
Since it was quite obvious I screwed up, I sprinted to get paper towels after I immediately cut the power. ( I should've done this the very first step.. stupid me.)
Afterward, I actually started to inspect the damage more thoroughly.
The GPU was around 10% soaked in the sticky drink. I got what I could off, but I knew the poor thing would likely die after a short amount of time.

The rest of the computer was thankfully OK, disregarding the plating of the PSU it also hit (giving practically no water damage in the first place).

5 minutes after cleaning it up, I tried turning it back on. 0 response.
I freak the hell out. A minute later, my stepdad forces me to sleep.

I was so scared that I was dreaming about it, and I woke up at 2AM because of it.
So, when I woke up at 2AM, my immediate thought was...
"Why don't I try again?"
So, yet again, I decided to turn it on.

BINGO!!!
It worked!
To my amazement, the PC ran fine.
However, due to extensive water damage, the GPU was rather sluggish. Amazingly though, it wasn't enough to hinder my gaming capabilities.

So, I kept using it till it wouldn't work as well for newer games, and decided to replace it for a GTX980ti.. (it was originally a GTX-640!).
I talked to the guys at the electronics store, and they were telling me "this thing has gone through serious water damage, it won't run."
I never told them I was able to run it with water damage, but if I did, I'm pretty sure they'd be shocked haha!

And from that experience, I literally swore to myself that I would always put my drinks on the >opposite< side of where my tower is! Wise words!!
So... there's my story :)
I can submit a picture if anyone is interested? It's "retired" now, sitting on my table.



 
I "dusted" my graphics card (9800gtx) with a hoover and laughed at the sound it made as it span the fan up. So I did it for a little bit.

Plugged it back in and it started making an odd ticking sound. tapped the case and it stopped. I knackered the bearings and I had to hit the case about every 30 mins when it started making a noise again.

Dont make the same mistake
 
Overclocking the Radeon 9600 in my cheapo eMachines laptop with crappy cooling. It was nice while it lasted, which wasn't very long. One day it booted up and it couldn't even render the shiny XP start button. Oops.

Lesson: Overclocking laptops is not a good idea.
 
This happened to my friend not me, but he bought a new gaming PC that I help pick out parts and he wanted to build it himself so I didn't oversee it (this was about 1 1/2 years ago). and he thought he put everything in fine and turned it on, everything worked properly(he had a decent gpu at the time but not anymore), while he was playing Diablo 3 which isn't graphic intensive at all he was complaining about his framerate dropping. Now lets go to a couple months ago, he wanted to finally overclock his GPU so he was searching around for ways to do it, when he found out how he started to go into his BIOS, but he didn't see any option to change voltage settings or anything.

Turns out for the 1 1/2 years of having it "hooked up correctly" he didn't have the graphic card plugged into power at all, just sitting in the PCI slot and had the VGA/HDMI cables going to his motherboard since he thought the GPU slots were for backup. He was using onboard graphics the whole time and hooked the cables to the wrong device. I laughed so hard when I heard that story, I made him feel like a total noob. All he did to fix it was plug in the power and move the cables to the GPU, turns out now that he gets better frames, who would of known :)

Note to anyone that's new: remember to plug in power to the GPU and don't plug in your DVI/VGA/HDMI cables to your mobo.
 
Some years ago, I've tried to install an Accelero EXTREME IV on my ASUS R9 270 (duh, not like the card needed to be any cooler 😀)

I've read the manuals carefully, installed the cooler, put the damn thing back into my rig, turned it on, and BAM!


The whole card was smoking and throwing sparks, turned out that I screwed up the plastic insulation layer holes, and a VRM got shorted out by the process





TLDR: Be careful when installing any kind of aftermarket coolers, you can easily fry your video card with them
 
I got one. Not exactly a mistakes story since one of us already had the same experience with Radeon 9600.

Anyone remember the might X1650XT ? Boy, those were the days.

So I try to play the newly released Devil May Cry 4 with it coupled with E2120 Dual Core with 2x1GB DDR2. Turns out, it didn't have stuttering or jaggies or ghosting or anything. Only runs in slow motion. You read it right. Everything in slow motion. Like, very slow. So slow in fact, I can dodge that yellow lightning beast's hurls at near collision which granted Nero(one of protagonist) special dodge animation that lasted for 3 dodges which makes things even easier.
I even completed the Bloody Palace with it. Heck, the Dante Must Die mode was hardly challenging, exclude that stage where Nero surrounded by a sword shifters and had to grab and throw one of them to damage some glass.

Then the days of the HD3650. And I got screwed badly. Not only everything runs very smoothly, except for that jungle stage where I get stuttering issues, the enemies also felt at much beastly behavior. I can barely kill Belial at Normal mode.

That was when I realized I suck at DMC4 once given the actual experience...
 


Hi Kernel,

I have a Dell Optiplex 780. Where did you get the PCI-E expansion riser from? A link would be great.
 
I don't really have a huge mistake I guess, but I bought a 280 new and I ended up upgrading to a 290 only a few months later. I did get a good amount of cash for my 280 when I sold it though so nothing too bad I suppose considering I got a 290 used for $230.
 
I wish my old video cards to the corn field.
Listening to a friend tell me he swears by a certain Manufacturer (I will call 'C'). So I took his advice and bought a psu made by 'C'. Less than 6 months, it slowly started black outs, once a week, once a day, once an hour. Turned out the psu auto fan setting was defective and the psu itself, was going south. As it went , it took out my mobo, gpu, and cpu. PSU voltage deteriorated and brown outed itself. I looked up the psu and found this company 'C' had issued a recall.
 
When I was a poor college student making $500/month and rent was $400/month I convinced my wife to let me build my first computer. I spent 2 months income on my computer. As it was my first time I was very nervous. I put everything together and told her to come watch me turn it on for the first time. I hit the power button and there was absolutely nothing on the screen.

I quickly told her to get out of the room because I was so mad and embarrased at having spent all that money and had probably ruined it. After an hour of fiddling around with it I let her back in to see if she could figure out what was wrong.

She looks inside and quickly says to me "You should plug in this card (video) the rest of the way." She pushes the video card into the slot the rest of the way and pushes the power button. It turned right on and everything was great.
 
i just build a pc for all my money turns out not enough money for monitor lol *facepalm* gotta wait 3 mnths to save enough money
 
I was moving parts around mine and my brother's pc years ago, I had his GTX 285 and was plugging a fan in while the computer was running, I kind of slipped, and the metal tip of the e-cigarette that was for some stupid reason in my same hand touched the top of the GPU and it had no backplate. I saw a little static shock and after that the card would display, but only green and red strips going up and down and you could barely make out the sign in page in windows, needless to say, I fried his card and he had to use an AMD 7770.

However last August I bought him a GTX 980 for his birthday cause I felt so bad after all those years haha.
 


Your wife is just brilliant ^-^.
 
My biggest failure just happened today. I was sitting at 1275 MHz (Stock Boost is 1050 MHz) on my XFX R7-250A-CLF4, which can overclock amazingly well (with extended official overclocking limits) for a low profile card, and I thought to myself: "How much higher can I get this card to go?" I ended up at 1325 MHz that was seemingly stable.. After an hour of playing Dirty Bomb, it suddenly froze and I thought it was because it was unstable at that clock so I reverted back to stock clocks and relaunched the game when I came to the horrible realization that I had fried my GPU when artifacts showed up on screen.

TL;DR : Idiot pushes cheap, underpowered, graphics card to its limits and now has to buy a new one.

[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZl2_nojp2s&feature=youtu.be"][/video]
 


Jesus Christ that's completely insane! In other news, my R7 250 suddenly started working properly again after about a week of non use because games looked worse than low graphics usually looks. Thank you PC gods
 


I forgot to mention i did it twice in a row, MSI didn't like that... 😉
 


I would love to see a picture, and btw look what i did 😛 - at the bottom of the posts somewhere
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom