Worst PC Build Screw Ups

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My worst mistake was when I connected a USB header on the motherboard grounding a powered wire (one of the last two wires). Long beeps went off momentarily when I restarted the computer. I raised the FSB and I smelled smoke from the motherboard.
The motherboard went completely dead and I had to repalce it.
Moral of the story: connect your USB headers correctly the first time or you may have a dead motherboard in a matter of seconds.
 
I remember doing mine for the first time as well. Royally messed that one up.

I think it was in a Thermaltake case. The mobo's guide and the case's guide differed. I figured (or at least I think this is what I thought back then) the Case is newer than the mobo (old system) so it'll be more correct.

Switched it on and one of the caps on it first just smoked, then there was like an electrick short-like effect on the one corner and then the thing caught fire.
 
Thanks for the 1Up Dade_0182
This is better than watching someone get flamed. Nice to see I'm not the only one thats done something that's everlastingly stupid, or that I wasn't the first or the last to do such. Keep the stories coming. Mac screw ups are also accepted.
This is kinda like a support group for PC people.
 
I remember getting my first large format HDD, a whopping 1.2GB. For some reason the brand (can't remeber the name) did not have the normal IDE connector. It did not have the plastic shroud to make sure you plug the connector in correctly. The only available slot was one of the 5-1/4 bays, so once the drive was placed in the bay the cable reached is maximum lenght, and I plugged the cable in missing two of the pins. It took me several hours of cursing and hair pulling to figure out why my new $50.00 Hard drive was not showing up as a valid drive.
Thankfully I did not mess anything up.
 
Oh, I forgot about this one. I purched an old server from one of the places I worked, a few years ago. It was an old P66 w/ 256MB RAM (oh yeh) I was going to use it as an experimental platform for alternative operating systems, so I thought. The motherboard had high standoffs, I guess to help with airflow. since it only had a two meg video card I decided to upgrade it with an old 8 meg Diamond Stealth video card I had. When I went to insert the card I forgot about the high standoffs and cracked the motherboard.
 
I just finished my first build. I have an Internal water cooling system and the first time I tried to fill the tank, I went too far. THe result: the coolant came leaking out of the fan on the front panel of the unit and stained my rug. Ok, Kind of a setback but no Biggie. I waited for the leaving to stop then figured I was at the perfect ammount. So after 10 minutes of opperation, I notice that my "low on water" warning is beeping. I ook inside my case and to my horror I see a slow but constant drip of blue fluid out of one of the tube sockets right onto my video card. Not a good day for me.
 
Ive had tons of stuff ups building computers.

but one of the worst probably was when i just finished building my new system with a crappy Cyrix 686 150+ cpu (i was still extreamly excited). The case was open and i'd just installed windows 95. Everything was working great so i decided to close the case, before i did i saw i hadnt put a screw in to hold the graphics card down. I didnt turn off the pc and dropped the screw onto the motherboard. It shorted out something and the board was buggered.

im sure this has happened heaps of times, i didnt manage to read everyones reply on this topic so i wouldnt be surprised if someone has already mentioned it
 
It wasn't so many years ago every government building, school or bank you walked into you were told, "I'll be a few minutes...computer is down!" 😀 It was like yesterday. The computer system was up for about 10 minutes every hour it seems! No matter where I went or who I called same story! LOL!
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Well, once at my work, I passed by the office of the person responsible for distribution, and I heard that he told some customers on the phone, that we could not ship that day, because "the computer system was down". Thing was, it was working just fine - he just didn't feel like doing more work that day, and used the "computer is down" excuse.

Being the responsible for the computer system, I naturally had to report him to our boss :twisted:
 
Did you fit the components together outside the rig before or was it going up as the rest of the syystem was built. I've been always told to build the water cooling system outside the computer and run it so you can check for leaks that way.
Hope your card survived the encounter though.
 
I haven't had any hardware issues at all with my 3 personal builds, but my father contributed to one. He bought the supplies with my suggestions and had to wait until I could drive up to put it all together for him. Well he was anxious and a techie guy, so went ahead and put the motherboard, PSU, CD and HD in. No big deal, they don't get in the way. When I get there I go to town getting everything in and ready pretty quickly. When I hit the button I see the short flash of a light and the fans move ever so briefly, a small puff of smoke, then nothing. Immediately I think power supply. If it wasn't the cause, it was a casualty. Thinking it was faulty when he got the thing I pulled the very nice (read: expensive) 500w from my personal desktop I had with me to test it on the build. Pop it in, hit the button, and a similar experience; brief light, small fan movement, then nothing. There was no smoke, but there was that nice smell you get when soldering and/or silicon burns. I got pissed. I pulled everything out and found the problem. My father didn't put the standoffs on the motherboard. Damage? 2 PSUs and an intel motherboard.
 
This build has been my single worst experiance ever... I could write a volume of everything that went wrong...

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My first mistake was beign one of the first people too own a RETAIL version of the X6800. The second was buying a Asus Mobo, and more importantly a $160 Mobo that acts like a $25 swap meet mobo. For Example: The Asus P5 Mobo came with bios version 309 (which came out with the core2duo was released). Well bios failed to support SATA Optical Drives. Asus, failing to recognize that they should provide known defects with their products, quickly lead me RMA two perfectly functioning drives.

The current 509 Bios is completely unstable with any changes to the FSB, on ANY multiplier. I cant even LOWER my FSB without causing the system to become unstable.

When I bought the p5B with the 309 version bios, I couldnt change the multiplier past 11 and when 509 came out, they made it possible for me to change the multiplier too 13... WOOPIE DOO!

BIOS 309 IDE Controller (JMicron) would fail consistantly after a hour or so on all optical drives... 509 is slightly better.

Bios 309 and the current 509 is suppose to support 1066 memory. But it limits the BIOS voltage to 2.1, which is .1 volts LOWER then most 1066 memory requires... hmmm

Asus P5B Basic Packaging says "Speed on Demand" or some shit... but it should say "Crash on Demand"...

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The second mistake was buying a watercooling system and PSU based on a local companies employee's recommendations... you might know this company... Its called frozencpu.com! well its a great company to buy parts from, but the people Ive delt with, for the most part, dont know anything about the products they sell, and really seem to not have a true passion for what they do. They sure do act like they know what they are doing... but when it comes down to it, and you start doing independent research and reviews, you quickly find out that you bought a product that has no credibility what so ever.

I have writen the owner of the frozen cpu, and I will see if he will allow me to exchange the product for a different item. I talked to a lower employee and was told they would not. If they dont, that would be very sad for me, and would mean that frozencpu doesnt support the products they sell as beign of good quality.

Im not looking forword to this, for the amount of time I spent setting up the wires for this device took around a DAY to complete.

I also bought an extremely restrictive flowmeter, and a temp gaudge and temp reader that DIDNT support my 8mm tubes... and then we bought conversion adapters that didnt fit, then ended up buying a different temp gaudge.

I also bought a premade watercooling setup that was made in germany. I tested this machine and found that it flowed 1 l/min and doesnt work much better then a good aircooler...

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Lastly, either while my motherboard was beign RMAed the video card was damaged... This may have been due to the fact that I didnt want to drain my system and so I left my VC card hanging from the water hoses... either that or the MoBo wasnt broken, and the Video Card was causing the crashing. I suspect the later...

Mike

Ive never experianced so many problems making a machine in my life... in fact, Ive never experianced a quarter of the problems I have now... this build has been cursed.
 
Did it still work?
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Thankfully yes, I had to move it to a new PCI slot but it worked until I fried it trying to OC it. Kept the SCSI drives though. Come to think of it I still have two of them, a 1.2GB and a 512MB. 8O
 
water cooling for noobs is a gateway to stupidity. !

Anyways a few weeks ago a situation came up that i had to dust off an old soltek board, and with a prescott, that thing ran so hot. so i decided to upgrade to a conroe chip so i wouldnt have to deal with the freakin prescott issues anymore.

i ordered a Gigabyte DS3 from newegg and it came in a crushed box, i was hesitant to open but figured i had to test it anyways, well The DS3 was DOA so i had to put the Old Soltek board back in well when i did this somehow i got some thermal paste (AS5) on the motherboard socket. well i put the computer together. plugged it in and pushed the power button. it hesitated for about 2 seconds, just long enough for you to go , uh oh. then it turned on. It posted and i went into the bios. everything looked good, i saved it and went to boot into windows it stopped at the windows screen, i heard a POP, then it turned off completely. after that it was unresponsive and i was totally worried that i fried the last bit of a computer i had for school. so i take the water block off and take the cpu out to inspect the pins, what i noticed after that just amazed me.

a small glob of thermal paste had either dripped off the tube when i was putting it on the cpu or magically got there (still have no idea how) but the chip it self was fine, actually had a lil bit of paste on it also, from the mobo contacts.

all in all a bad motherboard got what was coming to it, and everything else works, i cleaned the bottom of the cpu off and its the cpu im typing to you on now.

lesson learned, when using pastes or liquids, dont do it directly over the mobo or case.
 
lead me RMA two perfectly functioning drives.
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Did you try those drives in another PC before RMA'ing them?

The second mistake was buying a watercooling system and PSU based on a local companies employee's recommendations... you might know this company... Its called frozencpu.com!
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One of my rules is to not buy a product solely on the recommendation of a sales person. At the other extreme, I do not buy only based on user reviews like on Newegg. I like to look for reviews written by people that have used many different products over a long timespan. I like to see knowledgeable people review products using reliable, well understood testing methods. So I read reviews on the web and in magazines and look for multiple opinions on items that are expensive. I'm not down on young people since some of them have been into modding and tweaking since they were real young but I am cautious when getting advice from the young to find out their background. Cautious and skeptical, that's my approach.

well its a great company to buy parts from, but the people Ive delt with, for the most part, dont know anything about the products they sell, and really seem to not have a true passion for what they do.
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I've dealt with people at FCPU that struck me in a totally different manner.

Im not looking forword to this, for the amount of time I spent setting up the wires for this device took around a DAY to complete.
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Woodworkers say: "Measure twice, cut once." The Clueless corollary for electronics purchases is: "Read everything you can get your hands on from respected sources and buy once" otherwise known as "Patience, Grasshopper". From time to time, we all get hooked into a bad purchase.

I also bought an extremely restrictive flowmeter, and a temp gaudge and temp reader that DIDNT support my 8mm tubes... and then we bought conversion adapters that didnt fit, then ended up buying a different temp gaudge.
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Did you read the WC forum stickies on Tom's before buying that stuff? One thing I noticed is a fair bit of consistency between Tom's forumz recommendations and those on other performance-oriented sites like XS.

Lastly, either while my motherboard was beign RMAed the video card was damaged... This may have been due to the fact that I didnt want to drain my system and so I left my VC card hanging from the water hoses... either that or the MoBo wasnt broken, and the Video Card was causing the crashing. I suspect the later...
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Did you have another PC handy to swap parts into and out of? My approach is to try to be systematic in isolating the causes of problems. What exactly damaged the video card?

Ive never experianced so many problems making a machine in my life... in fact, Ive never experianced a quarter of the problems I have now... this build has been cursed.
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Well, maybe be more patient next time, do your homework before purchasing, take the troubleshooting one step at a time, get the rig working on air cooling then add WC later, etc.
 
I did something similar when in the Air Force. The whole bench shut down instantly. A tech came in to repair what I had messed up. I said "It only was there a moment". He replied, "It only takes a moment. Be glad you're still alive."
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:lol:
 
Mine was quite a screw up... occured about 3 years ago. I was building a family PC that ended up being 80% mine.. anyways it had an Athlon XP 2000 w/ ECS K7S5A motherboard. The combo deal was for $100 at Fry's, and I was on a very tight budget. Unfortunately, the CPU was "bare" so i had to buy a heatsink/ fan. The Fry's guy recommended a Thermaltake one that was about $20 but I was feeling guilty about spending my dad's money so I went for a cheaper one that had no thermal tape on the bottom. I realized this when I got home, so I tried to apply thermal paste to the CPU core for the first time in my life. I didnt know you had to squeeze out a tiny drop, so I squeezed out the whole tube (it was like 3-4mm thick over the core). Needless to say the CPU went totally bust... I think when I put the heatsink on some of the paste overflowed onto the socket.

Anyways... I went to Fry's the next day and got a replacement and more thermal paste. Unfortunately the same thing happened again... and again... and again... and again. I'm not joking. I literally burnt 5-6 Athlon's in succession and got a replacement everytime. In the end I returned the cheap cooler and got the Thermaltake one. THAT particular Athlon XP replacement works to this day.

Other than that... I got exploded capacitors in a couple cheapo power supplies. Nothing happened to the rest of the computer, but the power supply went off like a gunshot and the capacitors were oozing this thick gooey stuff.
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LOL

i still have my k7s5a/1800.... had it @ 2400 with the pin mod....damn thats a stable board....no joke...i just could never crash it....

@ all
My only mistakes tend to be in forgetting to plug stuff in...sometimes....that 9800 Pro just loved to tell me..."hey you plug me in"....Guess i am lucky....never blew anything yet....hope it stays that way....Now other stuff.....that i can break....too many blown speakers...dead VCR's(they just kill themselves...so i went to DVD)
 
Well here I go....

A couple of months ago I decided that I needed another fan on the side of my case blowing on the vid card & south bridge. So I take the plexiglass side off & head out to my workbench.( before I did this, I had a few Limon & cokes)

Well I read on here about using a cd to trace the hole for 120mm fan. Well that worked out awsome & the hole was the perfect size, but....when I take the plaxi in to mount back on the door, I realize i had flipped the plexi upside & over. So after i threw it on the case it would be blowing right at a big old hunk of metal & not doing any good.

Needless to say, now I have the fan mounted where i want it & have a piece of cardboard patching up my f/u.
 
Cheap water cooling = Thermaltake bigwater

Thermaltake big water = cheap pump, shitty cables, and liquid that is conductive. The device used rubber O rings to stop water from escaping, if it was to tight = leak, if it was not tight enough = leak.

Needless to say I lost an ASUS Radeon 9800xt to that disaster of a wc system.

I ripped it out, and now I use the Thermaltake Big Typhoon.
 
1) One of my first self-builds (A 486DX or something like that). It was a mini-tower, and I was upgrading the RAM or something. Back in those days you could really only take off 1 side of the tower. I needed to take the other side off, so I reached inside to see if there was a switch to pop the side off (Around the other side of the CD-ROM/Floppy cage). There was a switch there, for sure, but it wasn't for the case. It was the power switch. (For those I've dated with this story, the old AT form factor wired the live AC voltage right to the power switch). My arm jirked quickly (from the electricity?) and my fingers were burnt. I cut myself on the case when my arm jerked. Not smart.

2) Before I really knew about ports (and hardware in-general), I did this: I had a computer with 2 serial ports an a parallel port. One serial had my mouse (😉), and the other was a scanner or something. Everytime I wanted to use the internet, I had to unplug the scanner and plug my external modem in (and vise-versa). I got tired of this, and not realizing the Parallel port was different than the serial-port, I found a wire that fit my parallel port on one side and my scanner on the other (scanner was serial). I plugged my serial scanner into the parallel port. Poof went the scanner. *edit* typo */edit*

3) My friend is just dumb, but noteworthy.He built his first computer without any advice or research. He built a P4, but only 1 stick of RAM (Ran it in single-channel. He thought because a 1GB stick was more expensive than 2 512MB, that it was better). He then bought E-IDE drives, but he had an SATA motherboard. He had one hard drive, but bragged to everyone he was running RAID (because his motherboard supports it). Moreover, he put his main HD on Primary Master, his CD-burner on slave. he had an old burner which had to be on MASTER to work right. He then started complaining that his new computer was slower than his old one, stating that windows AND games were slower. He was using integrated graphics.
 
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