Worst Tech mistake you have ever made?

[Fast_N_Curious]

6 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Hey! See you have a non blower in a z820... 

I've noticed terrible temps into the 80s and 90s on max fan speed on my z620 with non blower GPUs, what are yours like? Just curious

Well the original RX 580 gaming x that I accidentally dropped and then stepped on used to run about normal for an RX 580 gaming X.  Meaning, I have decent flow from front to back in the case. It actually ran cooler than one of my other rigs which has no side covers at all. But, still, these RX 580s run very hot. Hot enough to fry an egg on the backplate, no matter how good your case cooling is lol..

 

As for the MSI RX 5700 XT Gaming X, it runs really cold. No doubt it has a very good cooling system, however, I was still very impressed how cool it runs in a z820. You can play games for hours then put your hand on the backplate and not get burned, and you definitely cant fry an egg. Again, I was very impressed with airflow from front to back, which is crucial when you have a serious powerhungry GPU. Ever thought about upgrading to a z820 yourself?

[zogthegreat]

@Storm-Chaser

 

(sigh) You reminded me of another f-up that I did more recently. Two days after buying my Zotac RTX 2060, I took my computer over to the kitchen sink to drain my loop. I pulled my new video card from my rig and set it on the stove "to be safe". Unfortunately, I forgot that I had made some coffee a few minutes before and I set my brand new video card on the still hot burner:

 

 

"Luckily" I set it fan side down, so I was able to install my GPU waterblock and the card was still good. I say "Luckily" because if I had put it down on the other side, I probably would have cooked the electronics on it.

 

To quote George V. Higgins, "This life’s hard. But it’s harder if you’re stupid"!

[EphraimK]

I also wiped a harddisk with all of my parents' data on it a while ago

[da na]

56 minutes ago, Storm-Chaser said:

Well the original RX 580 gaming x that I accidentally dropped and then stepped on used to run about normal for an RX 580 gaming X.  Meaning, I have decent flow from front to back in the case. It actually ran cooler than one of my other rigs which has no side covers at all. But, still, these RX 580s run very hot. Hot enough to fry an egg on the backplate, no matter how good your case cooling is lol..

 

As for the MSI RX 5700 XT Gaming X, it runs really cold. No doubt it has a very good cooling system, however, I was still very impressed how cool it runs in a z820. You can play games for hours then put your hand on the backplate and not get burned, and you definitely cant fry an egg. Again, I was very impressed with airflow from front to back, which is crucial when you have a serious powerhungry GPU. Ever thought about upgrading to a z820 yourself?

The z620 with both CPUs blocks a lot of airflow because of the risers. My GTX 980 blower card is fine - mid 60s when gaming and 65-70 when rendering. 

I have dreamed of a z820 for a while but just can't afford it. 

[Fast_N_Curious]

Just now, Mel0nMan said:

The z620 with both CPUs blocks a lot of airflow because of the risers. My GTX 980 blower card is fine - mid 60s when gaming and 65-70 when rendering. 

I have dreamed of a z820 for a while but just can't afford it. 

Keep an eye out on eBay...

 

You might find one for parts or repair for like $150, that's what I did and such a good deal I purchased two of them. 

 

They usually sell for "parts or repair" but typically only need a hard drive or memory and are not actually broken at all. 

[da na]

3 minutes ago, Storm-Chaser said:

Keep an eye out on eBay...

 

You might find one for parts or repair for like $150, that's what I did and such a good deal I purchased two of them. 

 

They usually sell for "parts or repair" but typically only need a hard drive or memory and are not actually broken at all. 

Yep. Last summer I bought a 620 as my first PC and specced it way out and intend to keep it for quite a while - only issue I have with it is the riser sometimes will get a bit loose and you have to disassemble it and clean it every month or so

[Fast_N_Curious]

1 minute ago, Mel0nMan said:

Yep. Last summer I bought a 620 as my first PC and specced it way out and intend to keep it for quite a while - only issue I have with it is the riser sometimes will get a bit loose and you have to disassemble it and clean it every month or so

Nice. Nothing better than a specced out HP workstation! is the 620 water cooled as well?

 

[da na]

3 minutes ago, Storm-Chaser said:

Nice. Nothing better than a specced out HP workstation! is the 620 water cooled as well?

 

Not watercooled. Not fully specced but it's a 16c/32t config, 32gb of ECC RAM (92 is max I believe), decent GPU and some other assorted cards (FireWire, Sound Blaster Z, USB 3.1) 

Mine supports the e5-2690 v3 CPUs as it's a V2 board, can't afford those but could theoretically get 24c/48t. Don't quite need it though - barely push this thing currently above 50% on any metric. 

I also have a 1tb SATA SSD, 2 2tb SATA HDDs, and a 400gb SATA laptop drive crammed somewhere near the PSU. 

[Fast_N_Curious]

52 minutes ago, zogthegreat said:

@Storm-Chaser

 

(sigh) You reminded me of another f-up that I did more recently. Two days after buying my Zotac RTX 2060, I took my computer over to the kitchen sink to drain my loop. I pulled my new video card from my rig and set it on the stove "to be safe". Unfortunately, I forgot that I had made some coffee a few minutes before and I set my brand new video card on the still hot burner:

 

 

"Luckily" I set it fan side down, so I was able to install my GPU waterblock and the card was still good. I say "Luckily" because if I had put it down on the other side, I probably would have cooked the electronics on it.

 

To quote George V. Higgins, "This life’s hard. But it’s harder if you’re stupid"!

This is about GPUs getting abused because everyone is angry that they cost too much. LOL

 

I thought this was funny for my screw up:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Mitko_DSV]

7 hours ago, macminitosh said:

Worst mistake:

Plugged a floppy power connector into a fan header on the mobo. It fried instantly upon boot, i've since then learned my lesson and double-check every cable before the first boot.

6 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

I've always wondered what would happen...

Thanks for answering that long time question of mine

Now this reminded me of my first year at university. This was probably in spring of 2019. It was a tuesday and that day we had lectures from 9AM to 8PM with barely any breaks. It's almost 7PM and one of our coleagues slipped and kicked one PC which fell on its side (we were all pretty tired). It wasn't turned on, we were using our personal laptops, but were still in a computer room since we were learning Python at the time. Anyway PC falls and the teacher (is it called teacher in university? she's an assistant, but I'm not sure that's how things are in English). So the 'techer' and a few coleagues who supossedly know a lot about computers try and turn on that PC and nothing happens, so they open it up. I'm just doing something on my laptop not paying much attention to them (I was too tired to argue with them). The do something, plug and unplug things and I hear the 'teacher' say "see this was unplugged, now it should work". And that moment the coleague who kicked the PC asked me to take a look at it and it's a good thing I did. These people who said they knew a lot about computers so they didn't need my help had plugged the floppy power connector to a fan header on the motherboard. I just looked at it for a second and immidiately unpluged it. They were not happy and decided I was an idiot, because they obiously knew more than me (this wasn't a mistake because we were tired, they were like this all the time), so then I explained to them politely that they do not know what they are doing. After I told them what would have happend had I not stepped it and stopped them, they decided that it's better to not continue trying to fix the PC. At the end they left the PC as it was before it was kicked and we all agreed not to tell anyone that PC was kicked (well until the end of that semester that is).

[zogthegreat]

1 hour ago, Storm-Chaser said:

 

I thought this was funny for my screw up:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(chuckle) Welllll,,,,, the bend in the box matched the bend in the display... ya sure that it wasn't a "feature"? 

[fishymamba]

On 11/18/2021 at 10:31 PM, staticdoestech said:

Am I reading this correctly? You had to BEND your ram?

Wow, did not expected to be quoted from a post I made 8 years ago. I do remember having to bend the RAM to the side a tiny bit to get the cooler to fit. Worked fine for the 10 years I used the system. I got low profile RAM for my current computer so I didn't have to employ the same method.

[GreatnessRD]

Bought two sets of 16GB Ram sticks from corsair a few months apart. One is Micron and the other is Samsung (Same speeds and timings, however)

 

Sadge 

[tysonx]

Buying i3-6100 for an AMD (AM3) motherboard.

[FRD]

Messing up a 1TB external HDD by carrying it uncarefully.

At the time 1TB drives were still pretty expensive. One day I decided to move the HDD a bit, so I disconnected it. I took the HDD, carrying it horizontally. I felt a sudden force from magnets of some kind, so I was kind of playing around with it, weighing it from side to side, wondering why the magnets are so strong.

Connected the HDD again and it was broken. It made a unusual reading sound and you could hear it was failing in reading.

I was still a kid and I didn't know HDDs had to be handled THAT carefully. It was our HDD with photos and videos.

A repair shop invoiced a couple of hundreds to fix it. Never did, just reformatted it and it works fine until this day. Now it's not leaving it's place, just to be safe.

[WhitetailAni]

Got a new one!

Deleted logd on my iPhone 7 w/ iOS 14.2.

I thought I had saved blobs via severest but nope, I got factory blobs which (while rare) are useless for futurerestoring.

[PipPapScallywap]

When i was but a wee sprat, i offered to clean the grime out of the family computer. i learned the hard way to make sure your thermal compound and mounting pressure are proper. My dad was not the happiest.

That was the same year i learned that backups need to exist.

[Theo Biggie]

knocked off an smd resistor while trying to get my backplate installed. This happened on my second build and i had to replace the motherboard. not a catastrophic mess up but im relatively new to the pc world so there's a first for everything.

[Fast_N_Curious]

just happened... entire retro CPU collection got a shock test today 

 

No this is the worst tech mistake I've ever made. It's going to take days to straighten out all the pins, bc the metal box also fell right on top.

 

 

 

[WhitetailAni]

1 minute ago, Fast_N_Curious said:

just happened... entire retro CPU collection got a shock test today 

 

No this is the worst tech mistake I've ever made. It's going to take days to straighten out all the pins, bc the metal box also fell right on top.

 

 

 

F's in the chat bois

What CPUs are those?

[Fast_N_Curious]

1 hour ago, FakeKGB said:

F's in the chat bois

What CPUs are those?

A couple pentium IIIs

AMD athlon XP 3000+ (barton core)

Cyrix 586

Pentium 133

AMD K6 3D NOW 450

X9000 core 2 extreme

qx6850 extreme

and lots more. 

 

there are more CPUs under the box itself. so annoying since I've taken such good care of them after decommissioning. 

[Anghammarad]

I did a few oopsies myself over the years, but the longer I'm in my job, the less oopsies occur...

 

first one when I was 16 or 17... migrating my Amiga 1200 from it's mainboard enclosure into a big tower... soldered a lot, and when I connected the external 2nd floppy to the internal header the board went supernova and a reall big gnd trace went poof... 

 

I repaired that myself the same day... the machine is still running now, nearly 30 years later...

 

2nd one was instead clicking "logoff" clicking on "shut down" on a remote session on my first job... with that shutting down the exchange instead of just logging off =) .

 

3rd a few years later needing to work from remote in the company at night, do upgrade/reinstall stuff... what they didn't tell me before, that vlans were active... to make it short... I shut myself out and had to do an early riser or fix it somehow... I managed to fix it and get a got nights rest ^^

 

 

[da na]

5 hours ago, Fast_N_Curious said:

X9000 core 2 extreme

At least a few were LGA, hope the pads didn't get scratched or SMDs damaged

[Sir Asvald]

On 1/11/2021 at 4:51 PM, WkdPaul said:

* threads merged *

 

 

 

Spoiler

That's a weird tech mistake that I heard of....

 

 

/s

 

[da na]

Fun story that might belong here, few years ago my friend chucked a 10 lb ball at a bowling alley CRT and it bounced off, I assume he thought it would break? But no...