Your biggest potato moment building a PC?

Hi guys,

This came to my mind on friday when i discovered that i potatoed hard about 2 months ago when i upgraded my rig.

I changed my X58 to a X99 2011-3 build.

I would have a random crash at least once a day during light load, youtube, downloading torrents, even at complete idle. The screen would go black and restart straight away.

I tried checking logs, and investigating all the errors, updating GFX drivers and USB driver, until friday when i finally decide to check my cables... I noticed my 24pin ATX on the PSU side was on a slight angle and not clipped in the whole way... There must of been at least 4-6 pins not sitting all the way in. Since fixing this, i have not had a single crash.

So the errors were just instability due to the power not being supplied properly. I have checked everything and looks like i haven't done any damage, thank god.

 

Not me - but a mate,

He had a GTX980, and upgraded to a 1080Ti - expected it to be plug and play, put the card in and was getting worse FPS...

I asked if he did a clean install of the drivers - and he said “why do I have to install drivers? I’m going from NVIDIA to NVIDIA”



Needless to say a quick driver upgrade, and he was smashing the FPS.

 

Back in the day, didn't actually know how heatpipes worked. Brand new fancy tower cooler was a couple mm too tall for case side panel to go back on. Solution? Cut top of heatpipes off with hacksaw.

Needless to say, cooler no longer cooled.

 

Rushing to get a build done for someone and left the sticker on the bottom of the waterblock. Luckily it was back in the day of flexible tube so it wasn't too painful

 

Haha yes that's a no brainer, always clean install new drivers.

Ah who needs pesky heatpipes!

Lol yeah flexible tubing makes life pretty easy, any time i have to make a change to mine i cringe because i have to disconnect my hard tubing and re-fill.

 

Back in the days when I first got my hand on a Duron I think, was doing an install and tested if it powers up before putting the rest of the stuff in. Heatsink wasn't on properly and puff of smoke appears as soon as I pressed the power button. CPU instantly fried. Thank god for thermal throttling these days. Anyway AMD replaced it thankfully.

 

My potato moment was this (several years ago):

- Was very drunk after Scotch session (one of those "my head is spinning" sessions, so not to severe...haha).
- Decided to install the 5930K CPU I bought off eBay.
- Instead of having the board flat on a surface I decided to leave the board in the case and have the case sitting upright.
- then tried to install the CPU into the socket.
- Several squashed pins later I realized I should not be doing this right now.

The end.

 

Ouch i'd have lost it if i saw that smoke!

:/ Could you fix the bent pins??

 

I was bored.
There was a PSU I had opened.
It was still plugged in, switched on.
I stuck a screwdriver into it, can't remember why.
It tickled.

 

Athlon xp. brand new board and cpu, put the cooler on hit the power button and it let the smoke out, i cracked the core on the edge of the cpu and it even burnt the motherboard below the socket. Lesson learnt - even pressure.

shocked myself more times than i can remember from opening tvs etc, leaving them plugged in, even copped it once from a tv that was unplugged the cap must have held a decent charge (old tube tv's)

T1

 

filling and bleeding a loop
accidentally left top fill plug off
turned pc on
coolant going everywhere
luckily i was in a workshop and not on the carpet at home
bit of contact cleaner on a few components
everything still works perfectly fine

 

Installed a thermal probe between heatsink fins for my at the time BRAND NEW Athlon XP2400+
The cable for the probe was wrapped around and accidently lifted the heatsink off the CPU

Room smelled of blue smoke for days. RIP CPU.


I bet I'm going to accidently order a x370 motherboard for the upcoming Intel 8700k.
>.>

 

Heh I did the same just recently going from a GTX670 to GTX1080. Was thinking 'yeah these drivers are pretty new, I only rebuilt recently, it's usually the same package for multiple generations'
..didn't work too well then noticed the drivers were last updated very early 2016.

 

Hahahahahaha.

I recommend a different hobby next time.

 

Delidded a chip for a fellow member. Was a bit disappointed in the result, temps weren't much better than they were before I started. Spoke to him later.. temps were good once he put the block back on properly. Somehow I'd managed to install it askew, only a pair of the locking screws were in the correct place, the other two not. Most embarrassing.

 

Had a stash of old motherboards in the shed from years gone by. Was building a cocktail MAME cabinet for a friend. Grabbed an old nforce2 board, put it in, but the 256MB RAM I had wasn't quite enough to keep the minimal OS+MAME happy.

Grabbed another RAM stick, shoved it in without looking (it was deep inside the cabinet), magic smoke. What? Oh, I put it in backwards. Neat.

 

Back in the day when PC's still used 3 1/2" floppy drives...

Regularly cleaned and rebuilt my kids computers. Absolute dust mines

Finished rebuild, put on desktop to turn on and test.

Smoke and glowing red wires from back of floppy drive....

Didn't think it was possible to connect power cable incorrectly...


But it was.

Amazingly, it still worked after new cable put in

 

Years ago when I first started building PC's, I had a heap of case screws and risers in a tin case. Didn't realise I had different sized risers....

 

When I first started, I didn't have my own PC, I had to use my Dads... so I bought a new video card for my Dads PC.

Spent all of my hard earned money (I was 8 or so) on a GeForce 2 MX400 when they were new.

Opened the PC, put it in... it only fits backwards? Weird.

Anyway, fit it backwards, got the hacksaw into the case and routed the VGA cable in through the back of the case, did a very neat job.

Everything fits nicely, time to power it on!

Nothing. Just a buzzing noise...

Unfortunately I didn't, at that point, understand what that the "4X" after AGP actually meant something, I was trying to run an AGP 4X card and only have an AGP 1X slot!

Of course I'd dremeled some of the PCB of the card so couldn't return it. I had a brand new spangly video card that I couldn't use, and I couldn't afford to upgrade the motherboard or processor of my dads machine. It sat there sitting on my shelf, taunting me, unused.

 

i remember my brother doing something similar to a family friends PC. trying to install a new CD-burner in a fairly standard desktop. was sticking out a couple of milimeters from the front of the 5 1/4" bay.

slammed it home a few times wondering why it wont fit.

pulled it back out and realised it was hitting on a little resistor on the motherboard and he had smashed it open. PC wouldn't work. luckily dad was a fairly handy guy replaced the resistor with one from some old VCR and worked fine