Post Your Biggest Motherboard Mistakes

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I got a new motherboard a month after I went through RMA hell and when I was putting thermal paste on the CPU, I wasn't paying attention and I got paste very close to the CPU pins (not actually on it) and a spot on the side of the motherboard next to the socket. I started panicking and I thought my motherboard would instantly short out. I then wiped it of as soon as possible and was still convinced that it was broken. But then, I re-applied the paste making sure it went on the CPU. Then, I put my cooler on, hooked everything up, and it worked and was relieved.
 


Ye I always feel slightly tense when putting in a major component like the CPU, its very easy to bend the pins as that has happened to me in the past.
 


I'm not really that scared of putting a CPU in a socket, it's just that how sensitive the CPU and the pins in the socket are makes be nervous when I do it.
 


Well above is my post about how I somehow bent the pins in a motherboard once even thou I was so delicate, never will understand how it happened.
 
Agree on the nerve racking element.
I always wondered why Intel dont make some kind of plastic guide to assist one i stalling a CPU i.e exactly level and directly on target. Blimey I would pay £30 formone of those LOL just for the peace of mind.
 


good luck next time ok...
I'm sure you wanted an unit of UPS....
 

My PC bulid doesn't use I/O shield too...
I/O sheild doesn't gain any computing performance 😛
 


Its mostly for protection and to stop dust and air getting in otherwise it will disrupt your cases airflow.

You really should install the I/O shield, its there to protect the motherboard and stock unwanted dust getting in.

http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/9850/what-is-the-purpose-of-an-io-shield-on-a-computer-case

 


Na but they protect the mobo from things and help with looks
 
I used to be a heavy smoker. One night of rockin some UT, it was hot in the house. I opened the case to let it breath. After finishing a map I looked in the case and saw a small capacitor pop with a puff of smoke. I didn't make the connection to smoking right away, not till I fried a couple more mobos. Have not had a complete failure since quitting the ciggs.
 


If that's not an incentive to quit, what is?
 


I have tried smoking and never understood why people do it (I know it's good for distressing/relaxing) it slowly kill you, your breath stinks and your teeth turn a horrible dirty yellow colour no matter how much you brush.
 
My biggest motherboard mistake was...you guys ever remember that P67 chipset defects on LGA1155? Which then every vendor issued a recall within certain period of time for a replacement namely P67+ chipset.

I wasn't aware of such recall.
Still using it to this day.
Only limited to 2 SATA3 ports.
Because the other SATA2 ports are dead by default.
 
WAR STORY: I was the technology coordinator for a school district back in the mid 90s, and we had a very locked down network to prevent the lil' darlings from getting to babes4u.com. Well, I had an inventive teacher that wanted to use her Compuserve account while at school to go places our network had blocked.

I got a frantic call to come to her classroom immediately, big computer problem..

Walking into the classroom, I can smell the electronic "burn" and ozone smell permeating the classroom. I asked the teacher what had happened, and got those innocent, "Gee I don't know, it just stopped working.." excuse.

I look in the back of the machine, and the CAT5 network wire was removed, and there was a... uhhh.. "adapter?" plugged into the RJ45 on the back of the computer.

I followed the wire, and noticed that about six feet later, the CAT5 cable was cut, and there was another cable attached to it.. OK... I followed the cable along, and at the end of the "added" piece of cable was an RJ12 (phone line) connector, and that connector was plugged into a phone jack on the wall behind the computer.

Before I had a chance to ask, the teacher blurted out, "I just wanted to dial into my Compuserve account.."

So she had evidently looked at the back of the computer, saw the RJ45 network jack, and since she couldn't plug her phoneline cable in there, she made up a cable of her own. Figuring, of course, that by plugging into the phone line, and then into her computer, she would be able to use her dialup account.

I was agog, simply agog. (Apologies to Eulalie MacKechie Shinn)

EPILOGUE:

What happened, of course, to fry the system, was the "hybrid" cable the teacher had made, where she carefully spliced the little wires from the phone-line into the CAT5, being VERY careful, of COURSE, to match the colors. And the result was that the phone company's 48VDC fed right into her computer, and when I looked into the machine, it had literally made several of the mobo and GPU chips GLOW until they finally burned out.

Ahh, technology! Ain't it wunnerful?

Cheers!

MM3
 

R O F L... good one!
 
When i was kid didnt know much about computers but had an instict to open things and figure them out, I took off the cooler and opened the CPU retention arm taking out the Cpu and sneezed in the socket, tried to clean it and bent a bunch of pins however latter i got it fixed but this was really dumb of me.
 
You know that little latch on the PCIe slot which secures your GPU? Don't try to remove the video card without first releasing that little latch. I pulled the PCIe slot connector off the motherboard because the latch was too hard to reach to release it. Mobo still works but not with a GPU.
 

Are you suggesting that there's a correlation between cigarette smoke and mobo/component failure?
 
so i have the rampage v extreme, and i went to update the bios, and updated the wrong one, so messed that bios up pretty bad, i couldnt even flashback, so i switched to the secondary bios on the motherboard and did the same thing.
 
I guess my biggest mistake was upgrading the bios from a USB HUB... then leaving my RAM in when I sent the motherboard for replacement... Then when I set it up again I put the power switches the wrong way round... before replacing everything even my GPU... 😛
 
When I was ..8 years old? Maybe I was 6 or 10..I forget. I needed to change the IRQ on my soundcard (SB16 at best..was running on a 386sx) ..So I went around to the back like I always do, pulled the sound card out, changed the jumper from 5 to 7 or 7 to 5 (i forget..was like 25 years ago) plugged it back in, went around to the front to turn it back on and......it powered off.

FML. I forgot to turn it off to start with hahahaha. (no CPU fans/lots of noise back then or anything to really warn me)

Ended up frying every card on the bus, but the motherboard and CPU/RAM still worked!! Had to get a new mouse card, new IDE controller, i forget what else.. LOL I miss those days :)

I still say to this day DOS was the best OS ever written because only 1 process could run at a time, now that sounds like a bad thing...😉
 


I guess at least Google can't stalk you then 😉
 
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