Post Your Biggest Motherboard Mistakes

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jpishgar

jpishgar

Splendid
Overlord Emeritus
Jan 5, 2010
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Many years back, I bought a barebones kit that I was pumped to assemble myself. Hastily, I assembled all the pieces and turned it on. It worked, but died suddenly. I could smell that tell-tale electrical burning that meant I had somehow screwed up. Every diagnosis I ran through yielded nothing. Brought in several of my system building friends to take a look, none could tell me different - all said it was likely a defective motherboard. That happens sometimes. I took the mobo back to the shop, and told them I wanted it replaced. They removed the board from the case and pointed at the bottom. "You forgot standoffs." the guy said. "Wait, what are standoffs?" "These little brass screws that keep the metal parts of your motherboard from totally hugging the metal inside of your case. You probably fried your motherboard."

Oh. So I was running current through my case. And scorched my motherboard to death. Cool.

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

We want to know what your biggest mistake building PCs has been as it relates to Motherboards. 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
 
Exact same- forgot the standoffs once. Fortunately being my first build I thought to have a more skilled fellow onhand who immediately recognized that.
Of course right after that he pointed out I had the motherboard upside down. After I had plugged in the cables.
And then I broke the I/O panel, so I didn't put it on. Surprisingly it ran fine for years (still fine now) but it got a wee bit dusty. It's now isolated from the family dog.
So, my first motherboard install was a bit of a disaster. Please don't make the same mistakes.
 
Thinking that the Launch of new Supermicro Gaming motherboards mean they are interested in the individual owner or domestic market.

They are only interested in Large Direct Corporates!
If you have a problem you face the worst RMA process I have witnessed in the computer Industy for 25 years!

If your first RMA is damaged in transit they wont help you a second time.
9 weeks later I am faced with being forced to try a MB that may have potential transit damage.

My advice is don't buy Supermicro, unless you can afford to write off the motherboard and any unique components you bought to go with it or you can afford the legal fees to take them to court.

Definitely dont go the 2011 v3 Xeon route, that will leave you with unusable:-
DDR 4 ECC memory
PCIe SSDs if you relied on their extra x16 PCIe slots
Xeon CPU if you wanted the 40 lanes
WiFi Cards

If you do want to go ahead - they have a serious packaging and or over-stacking problem
Namely the Retail box has no gap or cushioning on the sides of the board. It is right up against the side - so any pressure is immediately transmitted to the product. Worse still the HD Audio and USB ports overhang the edge of the board so they take the first pressure.
So look inside the retail box for the tell take indentation where the MB was crushed intomthe side of the box.

The X10SRA-0 needs the latest BIOS , and bios updates dont take properly and fried my first £500 Xeon CPU. So you must get a board from the latest production run!
 
first time installing motherboard. mATX board, put in too many standoffs. somewhat there was some spots for standoffs under the case but not one kid of form fit those. probably some defect or the case was double punched. so I put ALL the screws in and then fried that motherboard.

lol not no standoffs, like too many?
 
Oh dear... The amount of people that are going to facepalm at this. My brother saved up for a while to get a PC. In fact, he saved up months and months to get his dream PC. The total came to around £1400 and i think its a beast imo. But anyway into my most embarrassing mistake which almost cost my brother months of work down the drain... He kinda knew what he was doing as he watched some videos before hand. He asked for my help installing it as he was new to building PC's and so was I, so he figured I could help him with a thing or two.

We had everything in place and everything looked fine (After following a YouTube video we had everything set out the same way as the vid)
And we tried to boot the PC but... nothing.
My brother thought it was the PSU (As it looked as though it had been used before) so he sent it back and got a new one. We then tried again and nothing.
Then after realising. there was a cable to connect the 'Power on' button to the mobo (retard mistake). The PC would then boot for 5 seconds and go off and on, repeatedly. We then realised that the RAM sticks had to be placed in a certain order or it wouldn't boot. Again, 5 seconds then on and off. I then realised the fans were not spinning. So i plugged a fan cable into the motherboard because it fit perfectly and there was also writing where it said 'fan' (This was the worst mistake ever) So after doing that, the PC booted up fine and we high-fived in excitement as we had finally got it working after hours. 20 seconds later there was an orange glow on the motherboard and we switched off the PC immediately. We freaked out and our dad came over and realised what we had done and explained to not put the fans power to the mobo. After turning the PC off, the glow went down and i noticed there was a burnt patch on the motherboard (minuscule burn patch, not extreme). My brother took a step back and didn't say a word for like 30 minutes. I really cant believe he didn't get angry at me!

It could of destroyed the other components but it didn't surprisingly.

Anyway that was my biggest mistake. BUT... He contacted the company on amazon and said it was a faulty board with the CPU pins bent (There was one that was bent but we thought nothing of it) they sent him a new one before we could even send the one we already had back... they must be growing on trees or something. Anyway I learnt from my mistake and he has his PC all running fine now.

DO NOT ever do what I did.
 
Most recently - I had to send in my H240-x water cooler for an RMA repair. When I went to put my intel stock cooler back into my PC... I totally forgot about how to install it properly. I didn't move the pins around properly and get them re-encased... So I scratched my motherboard. Even doing some basic repairs from "how to fix your mobo" tutorials... I still have all sorts of problems that I never, ever had before. Looks like I need to buy a new motherboard. 🙁
 
My biggest motherboard mistakes?
forcing CPU to be inserted on a wrong socket. resulting i need to buy a new mobo coz a "human error" damage aren't recovered by warranty 😀 😀

Cheers!
 
Buying asus motherboard and trying to update bios without previously reading on forums how crappy the release was (caused me to brick my bios in rollback - asus suite II overclocked my system rendering it unstable and it completely crashed mid bios update) love you ASUS <3

<<Language please>>
 
Killed my Foxconn Z68 while trying to flash to a newer bios despite the AMI utility saying the rom sizes didn't match I went ahead because the website listed it as an update
 
Bought an ASUS m5a78l-m/usb3 motherboard for my 8350 (yes i know not a great one but its ok i didn't use this board later) Literally seconds after pulling the mobo out of the package i lifted the motherboard by the northbridge heatsink, it came unseated and I was forced to pull off the heatsink and re apply thermal paste, no biggie right, well WRONG. Asus puts a thermal pad around the chipset for some reason and it tore when cleaning the old paste off, but it wasnt anything major, so it still probably would've worked, but when re applying the heatsink I realized that I put it on backwards and it would block the pcie 1x slot behind it, so i removed it again and the pad tore more and got the new thermal paste on it, (its conductive paste just for anyone still reading), during cleaning of the chipset I got the paste on the motherboard as well, I cleaned it up as best as I could but I would doubt I got it all then I re applied the heatsink correctly and just figured it was bricked and bought an asrock 970m pro3 matx mobo and its been good, but tonight I was trying to jimmy rig another fan into my case, after realizing the fan wasnt going to work, I pulled it out, but the little clip that holds fans in broke off (I really hate those things) but it works fine so I guess I "improved" my new one.
 
Bought Gigabyte GA-F2A88XN-WIFI for A10-7800. To be able to use FM2+ processors with it (and A10-7800 is FM2+) you have to update bios first and to update bios you need CPU. So I had to buy cheap FM2 CPU and try to return it (successfully) afterwards. Besides that, nice motherboard, easy OC, build in wi-fi and stuff...
 
Well i don't know if this was my mistake or if the board was like this before hand as I didn't look but when I installed an i5 4460 into an asrock board and loaded up the pc and did all the installs then put my GPU in I couldn't get a display. It took a few PC technician's till I found out that seven pins in the socket were really badly bend.

I was super surprised as I had installed Haswell CPU's successfully in the past and I had put the CPU in so carefully while lining it up with the arrow on the socket. I had no idea how so many pins had bend.

Got a replacement board and installed the CPU again and everything was fine.

I will never understand how the pins got bent.
 
Not really a fail but something I was kind of proud of. About 10 years ago I had just sunk all of my spare cash on new mobo/cpu. Get home and install everything.

Hit the power button. Nothing. Open the case and finally figure out that I did not have the 8 pin atx power connector hooked up... because my PS didn't have one.

I knew my PS had enough juice to run it but did not want to drive the 45 minutes back to the store to buy an adapter or new PS with money I didn't have. In the best MacGuyveresque fashion I came up with a plan to cobble together my own 8 pin connector by ripping connectors out of a couple of scrap power supplies. Carefully studied the pin settings and spliced in my new connectors.

That machine is still running strong today.
 
Another stand off sob story, yet kind of not my fault entirely. Was building my first PC, was excited as hell. Had some real small SilverStone case, couldn't even fit my 970 in it when I bought that later on. Put everything together, pressed the power button, nada. Checked PSU, wasn't turned on. Whoops, flipped switch to on position. Pressed power button again, nothing. Flipped the PSU switch off and on again, made sure power switch was actually connected to jumpers, made sure power cord was firmly seated. Pressed it again. Still nothing. Started getting upset, I was like 13 and spent $700 so that was pretty much my life savings I thought was gone. Had my father bring it to a repair shop, takes them a WEEK to figure out I had no stand offs. They throw some in, boom, works. I think to myself "That's pretty stupid, and was never in the instructions". Checked the little baggy of parts from the case, there are no standoffs inside, curse at silverstone a little. So yeah, didn't even have stand offs come with my case. Worst part about the incident? The repair place charged my father $100 to put in 8 or 9 little copper standoffs. And why it took them a week to even figure out I didn't have stand offs is perplexing. Not like they were bogged down with work, just a little shop. Also don't know I was able to short my mobo 3-4 times without frying it.
 
while removing the power cable, I accidentally broke my motherboard.......anyways, it was a decade old.
 
My first major build, in several years, was an Intel i7-920/x58 system. Mobo was a GA-x58A-UD5 with 24GB (max allowed) of RAM. I did NOT overclock it. I used a fairly standard nVidia 9400 board. Nothin' fancy. I just wanted a reliable, stable production machine.

That's exactly what I DIDN'T get. The bloody thing was flakey, subject to spontaneous crashes, and seemed to get worse the warmer it got. After many hours, days, and weeks of self-inflicted tonsorial damage, I finally discovered the real problem. During an early clean-up and reassembly of the mobo, I had removed the CPU to clean and regoop it in preparation for a new heat sink. During the reinsertion process, I somehow hit a few of the socket pins with the edge of the CPU board. This bent the pins such that they shorted intermittently, based mostly on temperature. It took a stereo microscope to find them and a thin wood probe to straighten them out. Once that was done, I had a rock-solid system that ran fine.

The real problem was that, in my frustration, and before the fix, I had bitten the bullet and bought a GA-Z97X-UD5H mobo, an Intel 17-3770 (not -k) CPU, and 32GB of 1600 MHz RAM to replace the -920 system. I was more careful with that one, so it worked great at first boot up, and is my current working system, running Windows 7Ult, 10pro, and several flavors of Linux.

I do have issues with changing boot drives for the other OSs, but that's a UEFI BIOS problem not hardware. Whoever started that fiasco should be either shot on sight or forced to use his own disaster forever. Micro$oft lock-in, no doubt.

Lesson learned: BE CAREFUL! These things are DELICATE. DON"T drop the CPU while installing it! It's a great tribute to both Gigabyte and Intel that, after all of that abuse, the thing still ran perfectly when corrected.
 
My worst so far is tame compared to many I've read here. I came close to forgetting the stand offs my very first build, but stopped before I could do any real damage and asked a friends who'd built many computers what they were for, but I think my worst was overclocking my RAM without knowing what I was doing and forgot to change the setting in the BIOS to XMP, rebooted and caused a bootloop. Thankfully Asus mobo's can be flashed directly from the USB to update the BIOS, so I did that and it reset everything to factory default and allowed me to try again. This time, with the latest BIOS installed, it went into another bootloop, but then after fully powering down and back up again, it posted because the BIOS apparently recognized my mistake and reset the RAM clock to the default 1600MHz without informing me. I ran a speed test and noticed it was still running at 1600MHz and decided to watch some videos and read up on overclocking RAM (I'd overclocked the CPU without any issues, so I figured RAM couldn't be any different). Enabling XMP fixed everything and now it runs flawlessly (so far) at 2333MHz.
 
One day I shut off my PC and when I tired to turn it on nothing happened. I looked in the case and nothing looked damaged and I went about taking out my PSU. I tested it and it worked fine so I decided to plug it back into the motherboard and the system turned on. Turned out I'm guessing the main ATX Motherboard power connector came loss but not enough were you could visibly see it was loose. I think it may have came loose when I was installing my new GPU a few hours ago.
 
I was running my Old Dell Pentium-4 via a Power inverter.. You know how frequent power cuts are here in India.. Even today a few drizzles and Whooshh!! The power goes off - So anyways, as soon as the power came back on, A reverse polarity signal surged through the system -- and Zap - There lay my Board, Smoking and charred..

Another time, I was trying to clean some cooling paste which had fallen between some CPU pins and Horribly bent them.. Tried to re-bend them in shape, but even after professional repair, couldn't get the board working -- a Write-off!!
 
Had a screw floating around somewhere in my case (you can guess where this is going!) It was fine for a long while, until one day I decided to move my rig to a standing position.

I Heard that darn screw rattle around and get stuck somewhere. Somewhere behind the mobo, and I didn't feel like unscrewing everything to get at it.

I figured, "It'll be OK." Hooked everything back up, and hit the power button.

POW!!! Something on that board went off like a firecracker! I saw a jet of flame shoot out from my mobo, like a little solar flare.

Then, suddenly, all was deathly quiet, as smoke and the acrid smell of burnt electronics filled the room.

Uhh... it was time for a new mobo anyway...

Sure enough, upon unscrewing that board, that screw fell to the bottom with a pleasant little "clink." Almost like it was trying to apologize for frying my board.


 


"(you can guess where this is going!) ??" -- I wouldn't have guessed it in a million years...

🙂) Nice one..
 


I liked the ending of that, it made me giggle a bit.

When I did my first build a screw got lost in my case and I was literally turning my case left and right till it fell out which it did as I knew if I hadn't it would cause an electronic short and kill my £300 starter build (this was back in 2014).
 


I never really believed that it would happen; certainly not to me. I'd kind of fooled myself into thinking that it was an urban legend. Looking back, I'd been conveniently ignoring the problem for years; sooner or later it was bound to bite me.

 
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