Post your first FAIL

[specks]

I had a crappy 4 year old generic psu that burnt the 4pin on my previous mobo. Pics coming later.

Lesson learned: Avoid crap PSUs as much as possible. My current PSU is still crap but i have a bigger wattage headroom to avoid possible problems

 

[xBruce88x]

about the CD-rom issue... reminds me of my old copy of roller coaster tycoon... it has a crack too... i figured maybe i'd copy it and then not use it anymore... well the drive dicided to spin up to max speed during the cd copy process... and BOOM! i had to take the cover off and pick all the parts of cd out... drive worked fine ever since. so i just went to TPB to get an .iso haha. I later ended up buying another copy tho along with RCT2

 

[silkstone]

How did ants eat a hard drive???

Thats what i was thinking. I did a little google research and apparently certain ants are attracted to electronic devices or it may be due to the magnetic field of certain devices... anyway it sounds like they eat some of the rubber and plastic parts.

Now im scared of ants in my house

I'm not sure why they were attracted to the HD. These were tiny little things, i had seen a line of them going into my case for a while. I tried killing them with raid (outside the case) but the little line would always come back, so in the end i just ignored them. a couple of weeks later, my hard disk fails and so i open up my case, remove my hard disk, and notice that my hard disk is swarming with little ants. I see that the have burrowed right in to the disk as there is a pile of silicon debris on the top from their "excavations"

They also got part way through my second disk, but i killed them all and filled my case with raid before they did any real damage.

Edit - I just remembered that i also had a family of mice set up a home in a pc a few years ago, too. But i managed to get them out before they caused any trouble.

 

[Chappy]

I baked my corsair dominator RAM ddr2 into a oven hoping it would get fixed, after that all the thermal pads leaked and become smelly. The ram still boot-ups but still with errors.

 

[silkstone]

Oh, I remember i once got a brand spanking new AMD duron and was using a aftermarket cooler. I hadn't affixed it properly before turning it on and "poof" i fry the chip

 

[DarkOCean]

I tried to bake in a microwave oven the pcb of an remote control ;the second i started the oven 4th july was in there.

 

[silkstone]

I tried to bake in a microwave oven the pcb of an remote control ;the second i started the oven 4th july was in there.

lol, you can't bake in a microwave!!

 

[maxritz]

Call it ultrafail

I bought an FX8150 after I had already build one for a friend.

 

[stinger608]

I have a socket A hsf I bought because it looked cool at the time. A thermaltake Dragon orb 3. Needless to say it has never been removed from the package due to how much it weights. I though that exact thing was going to happen if I installed it. Here's a pic

https://encrypted-tbn1.google.com/i...vkg9V9J7x2JgUVqmlzduZjoiIBEjssqpNxWwOgAnRioz7


Solid cooper base. things feels like it weights 5 pounds. lol Doesn't look it though.

I actually purchased, and used, 3 of these coolers. They made two different versions, one with an aluminum base and one with the copper base. All three that I purchased were the copper base and as you mentioned are damn heavy. The positive point is that the Dragon orb 3 has the 3 pin retention bracket so there never was an issue, at least with me, of the cooler popping off. However, they are insanely loud unless they are run through a fan controller. I think, if I recall correctly, the fan runs full bore at over 5,000rpm's. Ear bleeding loud.

Now be honest here. How many of you have crushed the core on a Axp? For me, I never did out of the hundreds of times I have installed coolers on Athlon Xp's. Never used or owned a shim either. Now I just got one in the last load of parts I got. I threw it in a box of spare parts.

Only one time that I did. It was on an old Duran 750. Was installing the chip and cooler and heard a faint snap sound. Pulled the cooler off to find one edge of the chip broke. found little pieces laying by the socket. Cleaned it all out and figured I would give it a try, since I had just spent almost a hundred bucks on the chip. Got the system motherboard together and poof it fired right up! Used that damaged 750 Duran for almost 2 years.

 

[ThE_MaD_ShOt]

I actually purchased, and used, 3 of these coolers. They made two different versions, one with an aluminum base and one with the copper base. All three that I purchased were the copper base and as you mentioned are damn heavy. The positive point is that the Dragon orb 3 has the 3 pin retention bracket so there never was an issue, at least with me, of the cooler popping off. However, they are insanely loud unless they are run through a fan controller. I think, if I recall correctly, the fan runs full bore at over 5,000rpm's. Ear bleeding loud.




Only one time that I did. It was on an old Duran 750. Was installing the chip and cooler and heard a faint snap sound. Pulled the cooler off to find one edge of the chip broke. found little pieces laying by the socket. Cleaned it all out and figured I would give it a try, since I had just spent almost a hundred bucks on the chip. Got the system motherboard together and poof it fired right up! Used that damaged 750 Duran for almost 2 years.

Yes the dragon orb is painfully loud. I hated that thing, but for some reason I still have the one I got back from rma. lol. So that one has never been used.

 

[Morgoth]

2 broken msi elcipse boards 600 euro wasted..

 

[DarkOCean]

lol, you can't bake in a microwave!!

lol, i know that now.

 

[user21]

plugged the monitor cable into the builtin vga of motherboard while running a discrete gfx card.waiting for display.............................FAIL............................... plugged it into the gfx card now waiting again...............EPIC FAIL...........wait WTF forgot to connect cpu 4pin power connector.


lesson: check all connectors properly before powering up

 

[Sound_Card]

Bolted down my AM2+ Epox board without standoffs. Turned it on, quick flash of blue light inside the case, panicked, then cried, and cried more after I found out what went wrong.

 

[The Von Matrices]

My first major fail was when I irreparably damaged my nearly new ATI 9800 Pro back in late 2003. I had applied copper heatsinks to the memory chips with thermal tape as soon as I got the card. I planned to replace the tape with Arctic Silver 5 thermal adhesive, so I pried off the heatsinks with my hand. Seven of the eight heatsinks came off without a hitch; but the eighth pulled off part of the memory chip. I didn't know the tape's adhesive was that strong! The card still booted, but it generated memory errors and yellow lines on the screen. I ended up having to buy a 9600 Pro to replace it since I didn't have the money for another 9800.

 

[NdMk2o1o]

Left a screw I couldn't find loose in my case, it shorted a 4850, may have bent a few pins in a 1366 motherboard...oops, put +0.5v offset into a 2500k as opposed to 0.05v (damn vodka + buggy efi bios fail) and fried it, must have hit 1.85v or close to when it booted << this was only a few months ago...

Broke lots of mice, headphones, gamepads and keyboards etc in anger too, I try not to do this these days as it costs me $.... lol

 

[GC_PaNzerFIN]

Not a single fail caused by user actions and I have been overclocking stuff since AMD K5-2. K6-2 was close to dying but that was completely intentional and doesn't count. Still works tho

 

[silkstone]

ahh... i just remember another fail.

It was quite a long time ago and i had an old 400mhz laptop. I had upgraded the cd-rom to a dvd-rom and it didn't work that well. The cd-r function would never work properly and i assumed it was down to the memory.

Anyway, i was had a couple of borrowed dvd's that i wanted to watch. i put the first one in and got about 60 mins through the film and it started badly skipping making the movie un watchable. So, i went ahead and started watching the second movie. I got 1/2 way through and the same thing happened. I was so pissed off at the laptop i ended up throwing the speakers at it and smashed the LCD.

The next day i went to watch the movies on a regular dvd player and the same thing happed, i realized that the issue was the disks being too scratched, not the fault of the laptop.

 

[Dolph]

Overclocked an AMD athlon 3400+, HSF wasn't on properly, overheated, started smoking, cpu shut down instantly. Couldn't even getinto bios. Reseated the CPU HSF, computer bios started spouting out words about CPU FAULT CPU FAULT. Ended up buying a new CPU/Mobo. Over a year later, tried to put that same cpu/board on a testbench and it booted up, not realisng all i had to do was reset the CMOS and it would have been fine .... herpderp.

 

[yogurt_21]

Can't remember my first fail exactly.

do remember dumb moments when slapping together my first k6. Damn that thing was slow. Felt like my 386 was faster.


My most blatant fail comes from my first experience with volt modding. Now I had overclocked gpus for years and had used water, peltiers, and phase change by the time I first encountered my Built by ATI (read built by sapphire) x700pro.

But I had never volt modded a card and the x700pro's disapointing performance compared to the 6600gt's of the time was frusterating me.

I knew if I threw more clock speed at it I could compete.

So I decided to start with a pencil mod and see how it went. At 515MHZ a 21% overclock I was pretty happy and finally able to compete. Then after a round of torture tests screen goes blank, unable to get it back. "Damn... I just fried my first gpu, blatantly fried it too."

OH well RMA, get a new one from ATI. (no questions asked back then, loved the built by ati rma process)

Thinking it was the pencil mod I decided to go full vmod this time and got out eh soldering iron. Did a nice little job on the card and overclocked it to the max, this time hitting 535MHZ or a 26% overclock. Nice. This card was being water cooled on the core and had nice big ramsinks on the memory....but no additional vreg cooling.

lasted a month then again after a torture test of benches, screen goes blank, won't come back.

"Damn, I just fried another one!"

OH well RMA, get a new one from ATI.

This one wouldn't push as far as the last, getting stuck at 525MHZ or a 23.5% overclock. Throws more juice at it, still no vreg cooling, gets to 530MHZ, torture test..... screen goes blank, can't get it back.

You know at about this time you'd think the warranty center at ATI would be suspicious. Now sure I cleaned the cards up all nice and pretty, but 3 cards all had their vregs fail?

Nope, ATI sends me a new card.

At least by this time I had learned my lesson and left it alone. But it wasn't until my X1800XT that I figured out "oh yeah those thingies need cooled too"

so not my first fail, but certainly my biggest.

 

[TheMailMan78]

Today? I woke up.

 

[de.das.dude]

never had a fail

 

[Horrux]

My first fail was while installing my first DDR memory onto a mobo. That little notch was so close to the middle... I installed the RAM the wrong way and pretty much ripped the ram slots off the mobo when pressing down to fit it in...

My second fail was with the first ever (in my experience) auto-overclock motherboard I knew about. After putting the PC together and installing windows XP, I run that little software for all of about 10 seconds. PC shuts down and never posts again. CPU was burnt out from too much overclock. WTF.

Oh yeah... Spilled a full glass of water on my Logitech G-15 2nd gen. Opened it up, blow-dried it, let it sit open overnight, blow-dried it some more, put it back together, now it worked... Minus the LCD buttons...

 

[yogurt_21]

My first fail was while installing my first DDR memory onto a mobo. That little notch was so close to the middle... I installed the RAM the wrong way and pretty much ripped the ram slots off the mobo when pressing down to fit it in...

My second fail was with the first ever (in my experience) auto-overclock motherboard I knew about. After putting the PC together and installing windows XP, I run that little software for all of about 10 seconds. PC shuts down and never posts again. CPU was burnt out from too much overclock. WTF.

Oh yeah... Spilled a full glass of water on my Logitech G-15 2nd gen. Opened it up, blow-dried it, let it sit open overnight, blow-dried it some more, put it back together, now it worked... Minus the LCD buttons...

had a friend who had a similar experience with his first auto-clocking motherboard, was a 939 socket amd FX-60, booted it up the first time and the clock speed was reading close to 3.5GHZ (compared to 2.6 stock)

morinically he goes "sweet" failing to think about the stock cooler he just installed, benches it instead of immediatly shutting it down and modifying the settings. Halfway through the bench... burning silicone.

 

[Horrux]

had a friend who had a similar experience with his first auto-clocking motherboard, was a 939 socket amd FX-60, booted it up the first time and the clock speed was reading close to 3.5GHZ (compared to 2.6 stock)

morinically he goes "sweet" failing to think about the stock cooler he just installed, benches it instead of immediatly shutting it down and modifying the settings. Halfway through the bench... burning silicone.

Yep, mine was a socket 939 too... It was a lowly 3000+ and the overclock was something like 300mhz, nothing I would have thought would fry my CPU, especially after all I had heard about how GREAT overclockers they were. But an FX-60, now that is another ball park. Ouch.