Stupidest mistake you've made while building a pc?

[FredyCH]

i think it was with my last built i finished yesterday.

 

I put mobo in and installed everything and realized at the end that i forgot the io shield. removed everything including mobo put io shield in it and installed everything just to read for the watercooling i need to install a backplate.... so took everything out again.... to realize that the case had extra cutouts to install backplate even with mobo installed...

 

really felt stupid to takte everything out 2 times for nothing

 

and the cable managment is my worst nightmare.

[lionlytydelanx]

I put the frame of my CPU mount in before securing the CPU in place with the lever. The mount blocked the lever going all the way down and securing. Ended up spending about 20 minutes trying to pry this tiny little connector from my motherboard. My god it was difficult 

[MandoPanda]

I spent ten minuets shoving the wrong end of a wire into the modular port on the power supply. Yeah, not my brightest moment.

[Underi]

I had an HP prebuilt PC with a custom motherboard built by MSI for HP. I hated the dumb cooler on it, it was literally an aluminium heatsink with a case fan hotglued on the top. I ordered a new LGA115x cooler for it and once I got it, I tried installing it and was like "Hmm, these holes look kinda small". The old cooler had screws that held it in the motherboard. Well, I didn't realize it was not a standardized motherboard, so I just kept trying to push it in until the mobo started to bend and I thought "Oh fuck, I don't think it is supposed to do that." Nothing happened to the motherboard, but once I built my current PC from the ground up and tried installing that same cooler on, two of the locking feet didn't work. I had broken the damn cooler and had to go with intel's stock cooler.

[Fasauceome]

My first build was a nightmare. I never plugged in my front intake fan, I didn't know how to install the Intel stock heat sink correctly (I got lucky enough that it worked), and I literally didn't cable manage at all, combined with the fact that I had a Rosewill power supply designed for SLI and beefy power delivery, there was a tangle of cables occupying so much of my PC

[imbrock]

Helping my little brother build his first pc. Get everything in and put together, plugged in lights on but won't power up. Try different power cables, reseat the cpu (which led to me not finding my thermal paste and us going and getting new thermal paste and then me finding my thermal paste), get super annoyed for a couple of hours thinking I broke something.

 

I forgot to plug the cpu power in and it was in a weird spot behinderneath a fancy metal gaming heatsink. 

 

SHAAAAAAAME. 

[xXxAdamxXx]

My very first custom PC in 2001 I cheapened out on PSU and motherboard, ended up killing everything a few months later.