PC Building Disasters & Close Calls

[Geekazoid]

Hi guys,

As the title indicates, have you had any disasters or close calls when building your rig?

If you have, please share them.

EDIT: Modified thread title because it was kind of ridiculous and updated this post accordingly.

Edited April 30, 2014 by Geekazoid

[Akolyte]

I built my first pc a week ago, I dropped a screw inside of the asus thermal armour, I lost a screw, I broke my hard drive.  I broke the optical drive lock.  

 

I also dropped the cpu heatsink, so its all scratched

[Oshino Shinobu]

I've only ever broken some RAM modules, other than that I haven't messed up (:

[AlexGoesHigh]

well my butterfingers attacked and i almost drop my GPU into the ceramic floor of the apartment, id saved it by holding on the pci bracket with just 2 fingers, that the only close call i had luckily 

[nixproducer]

well recently i just broke off a sata port off of my motherboard, and bent some capacitors on it, but everything still works

[Jobbe03]

I dropped my pc after having spent 4 hours doing cablemanagement, nothing happened but it sounded horrible.

 

 

 

i cried.

[LOLPhilips]

Arrrr,

 

The tale I'm about to tell ye will rattle yer bones,

Me and me hearty crew we was sailing the mediterranean, when all of a sudden a gust of wind picked up me PC and tossed it overboard.

I be sending anyone of me scallywag crew overboard in an attempt to recover me PC. Alas it was to no avail.

[Me1z]

I had an AIO liquid CPU cooler spring a leak and start dripping on my GPU. The only reason anything survived was because I was playing Skyrim on max settings and my GPU was overheating. The excess heat caused all of the dripping coolant to evaporate before it could cause a short. And then of course I ripped out the power cord as soon as I heard the hissing sound, because there is no situation where a hissing computer is a good thing. 

[renz62]

When I switched over from an LGA775 to an LGA1150 mobo it took me an hour to actually realize that my CPU cooler was set only to fit LGA775 mobo CPU cooler holes, I had to check the cooler manual on how to fix this issue.

 

I felt really stupid after and laughed really hard at myself  :lol:

[Jdogbf]

Tried pushing my HDD back in to the dock when the SSD and HDD were on the sam cord and in the bay right above the other. It broke the sata power on the SDD, Luckaly I had another cord for SATA power.

[Mooshi]

Let's just say cats cause static build up and RAM doesn't like this.

[GuruMeditationError]

I built my first pc a week ago, I dropped a screw inside of the asus thermal armour, I lost a screw, I broke my hard drive.  I broke the optical drive lock.  

 

I also dropped the cpu heatsink, so its all scratched

 

Congratulations, you are now one of us (and by one of us I mean a P.C. enthusiast).

 

I fried a GPU trying to install an i/o back plate cover while the machine was running. I would have been okay but I'd been working on the thing all day and all night and when I laid down to fit the plate I kind of drifted off to sleep for a second and was woken up by the smell of the mystic blue smoke being released from my graphics card.

 

A couple of days ago I cut my knuckle pulling a molex out of a DOA hotswap drive-bay I've got to RMA. It came free with such force my hand flew backwards and I sliced my knuckle open on the edge of my tactical tracer RAM. I hit a small blood vessel because it bled a lot and had to put a plaster on my finger-joint so I couldn't bend it properly for a day or so. Luckily my RAM's okay but I've got an indent in my knuckle the shape of the pattern on the edge of Crucial's Tactical tracer RAM sticks. 

[Guest Kloaked]

I bent a pin inside of the USB 3.0 header on my old Maximus V Gene. Took me forever to figure out why my USB ports wouldn't work.

[SkilledRebuilds]

Not looking 100%, rushed,.....& Plugging a PCIE 6pin into the Motherboard 4pin

New motherboard sized paperweight, Awesome!

 

Never lost a single drop of blood doing your tech work?, your doing it wrong!!!

[Imabigmac]

Had tea short out a gpu an then almost had the replacement gpu short out with cream soda. The tea got spilt and poured into my case, i was surprised i didn't kill anything else. Found dried tea on spare psy connectors behind the mobo tray, there was tea just millimeters from going into the cpu socket, small pools on the i/o components, even the ram sockets had some tea around them. About after 2 months the cade everything began to small really bad, and i had to buy a new one.

[CJPowell27]

I yoloed with an old case and Asrock board and plugged wires in wrong (on Purpose) and the wire casing melted 

[Art Vandelay]

I broke 3 standoffs on my first case ever... but it was the cheapest case in existence

 

Other than that, it's been smooth sailing because I'm careful. I've dropped screws under chipset heat sinks and stuff, but they always come out before anyting gets powered

[roberto++]

I had 3 old amd athlon xp series cpus and motherboards, I attempted to Frankenstein one system together for beast performance. probably no more than 300 MHz difference between processors.

 

CPU & heatsink install went ok, no issues, remembered thermal paste

 

placed the motherboard directly on metal side panel and powered on the motherboard.

 

I successfully shorted and killed 3 motherboards and CPUs in less than 2 hours.

 

R.I.P amd athlon xp 3200, my first DIY build.

[Geekazoid]

@WoodenMarker, Thanks mate!

[deafboy]

Worst thing by far was my ankle when making Rad mounts.  Hole saw kicked and went after my nearby leg.

 

[Geekazoid]

@deafboy, OUCH! Boy, that must've hurt. Is it all good now, I'm guessing it would've left quite a scar?

[deafboy]

Actually didn't hurt at all.  Well, until the next day after the ER and stitches.  Hurt like a son of a b____ to walk.  But yeah, got a nice little scar as a reminder

[Folix]

Do we have NSFW tags? that image needs some.

 

anyway. my first PC disaster was when I decided to do a thorough cleaning job on my old packard bell desktop. I really didn't know what I was doing and decided that the heatsink was so dusty I needed to take it off to clean it, so I did. I then realised that I couldn't re-attach it as the screws were sprung and I couldn't figure out how it should be done. So I started reading up on how to replace heatsinks, learned about thermal paste and bought my first aftermarket cooler (ASUS axe square, i thought it looked cool and it was being sold off) 

In a way screwing up make me realise that I liked messing with computer hardware, and here i am now with my own self built rig.

[_wky]

Bent a few pins in the socket, took me about 2 hours sorting that out.
Other than that I just really bad luck with components. Had to send half of them off to get ones that actually worked.
 

Worst thing by far was my ankle when making Rad mounts.  Hole saw kicked and went after my nearby leg.
 
<ouchie>

Was, was that your knee?

[kellar]

It was a couple of years ago

i was installing my new Core2Quad and i put it the other way around and almost broke both the mobo and the cpu