What's the most annoying PC build you have ever owned?

[Guest]

Have you ever built a complete beast of a build only for it to turn into a broken Frankenstein's Monster riddled with issues that you either had to live with or spend hours trying to fix? 

 

Share these experiences! 

[ItsTheDuckAgain]

had a watercooled pentium 2 back in the days, watercooled via custom made cooler and a garden pump with a 50l bucked. worked well. sometimes the cpu needed to be readjusted because it came loose from the strain put on it by the tubes. but it worked for about 3 years. then shit started going south. long story short: motherboard broken :-)

[Tiwaz]

Just now, ItsTheDuckAgain said:

had a watercooled pentium 2 back in the days, watercooled via custom made cooler and a garden pump with a 50l bucked. worked well. sometimes the cpu needed to be readjusted because it came loose from the strain put on it by the tubes. but it worked for about 3 years. then shit started going south. long story short: motherboard broken :-)

you could use a barrel as reservoir so you wouldnt even need a radiator

[ItsTheDuckAgain]

1 minute ago, Tiwaz said:

you could use a barrel as reservoir so you wouldnt even need a radiator

it didn't have a rad :-)

[Tiwaz]

5 minutes ago, ItsTheDuckAgain said:

it didn't have a rad :-)

were the temps good?

[Jerped]

you can check my build log if you want to have fun:

 

 

[ItsTheDuckAgain]

2 minutes ago, Tiwaz said:

were the temps good?

yeah they were ok - didn't know how to overclock anyway so it didn't run to hot. in the summer I also bathed my feet in the bucked, so it was cool enough.

[vong]

My 1st system had a few problems like random BSOD's, video/audio problems and data transfer problems. Did multiple reinstalls and those problems eventually showed up again.

[Nicnac]

I once had a windows ME machine. Nothing ever worked lol

[Brennan Price]

Yes my main PC first had Windows 7 on it that ran absolutely fine until one day, the GPU drivers broke and I couldn't fix them. That is what forced me to download Windows 10 at the time and I haven't ever gone back... Even though I am writing this comment on a Potato PC Linux Machine... 

[Kevo05s]

My first real gaming beast was a pain... or it's ram to be exact... I had decided to go all out and do watercooling, and when I bought my stuff, I got myself HyperX H2O ram, which came "pre watercooled"... the pain was, HyperX used tubing SO SMALL AND OUT OF STANDARD... it was awful to get it to work with it, I had to go to the local plumbing store and get some weird plastic fittings with zip-ties and lock-seal... looked horrible... ended up selling the ram and getting HyperX Fury ram 

[Limecat86]

My first machine was an IBM with a 100Mhz pentium CPU, 64MB RAM, and a 800MB harddrive. That's about 19 years ago.

It could play some simple games. But I always had diskspace issues. Once I turned it on and smelled something burning. It was dust residing in the PSU which I resolved with compressed air.

 

[TetraSky]

When I first built my computer, I had initially gone with an AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition.

No matter what I did(bios, format, etc...) or changed in the computer(hardware), I was getting "HyperTransport Sync Flood Error" over and over again.

Bought a couple motherboards, RAM kits and even buying the same CPU but with a newer stepping that supposedly had a better memory controller... Nope still getting HTSFE... I ended up wasting hundred of dollars trying to make it work, it never did.

Tried every hardware testing tools out there to find out what could possibly be the problem, even bought it to GeekSquad so they could put their MRI software in it to try and determine which part was faulty... Yet none of the tests ever failed. I was randomly getting HTSFE yet the hardware itself is reported as working regardless of how many hours is spent testing it... Fuck me.

I eventually got so sick of it, I figured, "what more do I have to lose at this point" and just bought an Intel CPU and compatible motherboard while keeping everything else the same. Just like magic, EVERYTHING worked flawlessly, for years now. (still using that same PC since 2010 after all... With an upgraded GPU, RAM and SSD overtime though, for obvious reasons)

As such, I became a bit "salty" toward AMD CPUs since then. But can your really blame me? When even their support had no idea what was causing that issue at the time...

[MercuryRain]

With a custom build that I built? Never, really.  Worst I had was my computers unexplained inability to play Unreal Engine games for 2 years.  Which I finally by chance tracked down to Corsair Link. But that's software, not hardware.

 

 

Hardware issues? Really nothing.  I mean, dead components here and there, yeah, but that happens.  Just buy a new component to replace it.

[Big Head Tech]

There is one PC I worked on that haunted my dreams. Everything kept failing. First the guy wanted to upgrade the RAM and case to fit in more hard drives and better multitasking. Then the motherboard SATA controller went. Then the CPU fan went. Then the power supply went. Then the gpu fan went (was an HD 6970 eye finity with 6 mini dp). Everything kept dying on me... Finally I gave the guy $200 back in cash and said I was done. He gave me a mini hp PC as payment so i figured it was worth that.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, TetraSky said:

When I first built my computer, I had initially gone with an AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition.

No matter what I did(bios, format, etc...) or changed in the computer(hardware), I was getting "HyperTransport Sync Flood Error" over and over again.

Bought a couple motherboards, RAM kits and even buying the same CPU but with a newer stepping that supposedly had a better memory controller... Nope still getting HTSFE... I ended up wasting hundred of dollars trying to make it work, it never did.

Tried every hardware testing tools out there to find out what could possibly be the problem, even bought it to GeekSquad so they could put their MRI software in it to try and determine which part was faulty... Yet none of the tests ever failed. I was randomly getting HTSFE yet the hardware itself is reported as working regardless of how many hours is spent testing it... Fuck me.

I eventually got so sick of it, I figured, "what more do I have to lose at this point" and just bought an Intel CPU and compatible motherboard while keeping everything else the same. Just like magic, EVERYTHING worked flawlessly, for years now. (still using that same PC since 2010 after all... With an upgraded GPU, RAM and SSD overtime though, for obvious reasons)

As such, I became a bit "salty" toward AMD CPUs since then. But can your really blame me? When even their support had no idea what was causing that issue at the time...

Damn, that sucks. I hate random issues like that. 

 

Pretty cool that you're still using the same PC since 2010 though, nice! 

[ElZamo92]

It definitely has to be my little bro's SFF gaming build, mostly because of the GOD DAMNED CASE. I built it first for a frien of mine. It had a 4790K cooled by an Arctic Freezer 11 LP, a Quadro K4000, 16GB of RAM a 500GB Kington V300 SSD on a Gigabyte GA B85N Phoenix AC, enclosed in a F*****G Cooler Master Elite 120 pro.

This case was HORRIBLE. The big ass HDD cage was riveted to the case an it was in fron of the only air intake, bot to mention that the front panel only has a small vent on the bottom to let air in. Long story short: the CPU would throttle at stock when I put on the "side panels" (it's more like a shroud that covers both sides and the top) no matter which cooler I used, not that the VERY limited vertical space inside the case left me with too many options. Then I gave up and bought a larger case to put the i7 in, along with a Z97 motherboard, 32 GB of RAM and a Hyper 212 Evo. 

So I thought that the spare components would be perfect to build a PC for mt little bro. I pun my old GTX 970 and an overclocked G3258 I had lying abround. The G3258 would easily overclock to 4.5GHz with the stock cooler rising the voltage a tiny bit, but it wouldn't cooperate in this machine, sonI had to leave it at a meager 4.0GHz, and it was LOUD. In the end I bought an i5 4460 and undervolted it, ehich made this system a lot quieter, but it wa A LOT of hassle. 

In the end, it took about six months for it to reach it's current state, during which I had to assemble and disassemble it about seven times. It was a headache. And it will still give me a headache if I game on it workout my bro's noise canceling headphones. 

 

[sierra]

mine was amazing but it was a custom built q6600 @ 2.4ghz 2gb ram @ 800mhz and a PALIT GT 440 2gb  GTA 4 at 20fps yes boys ! - sierra

[Guest]

42 minutes ago, sierra said:

mine was amazing but it was a custom built q6600 @ 2.4ghz 2gb ram @ 800mhz and a PALIT GT 440 2gb  GTA 4 at 20fps yes boys ! - sierra

Haha. I'll never buy a PALIT GPU again though... had so many problems with my 980.

[mutedcurmudgeon]

Probably any of the old Dells that my dad had that I would fix an upgrade over the years. The definition of annoying has a picture of Dell and HP's case and motherboard layouts next to it.

[TheRandomness]

My current build because trying to get a graphics card onto a motherboard that doesn't have a PCIe slot results in a few issues.

[TheRandomness]

3 minutes ago, Jorgen297 said:

Oh wow are you kidding me? Did you mean to only run iGPU, then decided to upgrade? A riser can probably work or something like Razer Core I guess. 

M.2 can be adapted to PCIe x4 provided the M.2 slot supports that mode