Stupid things one has done with hardware

[FoulOnWhite]

Destroyed a z390 board and a gtx1080ti with a water leak, was really annoyed.

This guy Anatoli Bugorski takes the biscuit though, put his head in a 76 GeV proton beam.

 

[the54thvoid]

Destroyed a z390 board and a gtx1080ti with a water leak, was really annoyed.

This guy Anatoli Bugorski takes the biscuit though, put his head in a 76 GeV proton beam.

Googled around to read about it. Found this:

 

[R-T-B]

I took apart my PC to mine crypto in the early 2013s and somehow lost money. Do I win?

 

[Kwadratowicz]

I've had plug with wires stripped, and I've tested how the outlet with 220V works, I've remember plugging it and touching the wires, then next thing I remember being on the other side of the room (I thought that it launched me across the room), only lately I've learned that My brother had disconnected me from the outlet. (And now when I'm doing something with electricity I'm checking 2-9 times before if there is voltage inside )

 

[Average Nerd]

I killed a RTX 2070 Super while trying to waterblock it, and once got shocked by a filter cap on some random PSU that I thought was deenergised.

 

[Shrek]

I've had plug with wires stripped, and I've tested how the outlet with 220V works, I've remember plugging it and touching the wires, then next thing I remember being on the other side of the room (I thought that it launched me across the room), only lately I've learned that My brother had disconnected me from the outlet. (And now when I'm doing something with electricity I'm checking 2-9 times before if there is voltage inside )

Might want to get an outlet tester

 

[80-watt Hamster]

Once killed two USB thumb drives before realizing I'd plugged the lead block into the 1394 header.

Spoiler: In my defense...

... 1394 and USB headers are keyed the same and, on the ASUS X58 Sabertooth, right next to each other and similarly colored.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

My first socket A system lead me to where Im at today.

Pulled the heat sink off and hit the power button. POP. And then I upgraded to socket 939 and never did that again lol

 

[masterdeejay]

My oldest i think with my 386 with a new case.
There was a connector for the front digit display — a Molex to 2-pin. Since there was no pinout diagram for the front panel, I connected the HDD LED, power LED, and other connectors randomly. Somehow, I accidentally connected the 2-pin power cable for the display to one of the wrong headers. The cable started to smoke and caught fire, and it burned out quickly. Fortunately, the motherboard survived, although the reset function killed on that mobo.
3Dfx Voodoo1 diamond monster, somehow it was hard to put in the card in the pci slot. So i used a flat screwdriver...it slipped on the card and got wedged between the GPU and PCB...
Dropped a Sapphire HD6850...i was lucky the card survived but the cooler not.
Put the RAM backwards somehow...it was burned but the mobo survived.

 

[gwync]

Did the old "my hand will work as a heatsink for 10 seconds" to post test a board.
Burned a pentium 4 shaped square into my palm at second 11.

 

[BoggledBeagle]

Dropping screws onto back side of the chip of a running GPU is so lame and I suspect quite often happening that I will not bore anybody with it. (it was only a cheap 2D GPU)

Now I cover GPUs with a piece of cardboard. Not sure if this is the best takeaway, but turning the PC off every time you need to do something in it is extremelly annoying.

 

[jak_2456]

Two things:
1) I was trying to clean up the thermal paste mess surrounding the socket on my AM4 board because I thought it was causing my computer to crash (actually the reason why I joined TPU in the first place almost a year ago), and I got so much 70% rubbing alcohol over the motherboard that it was enough to cause a slight short. I thought I killed the motherboard until I came back a couple hours later and it POSTed just fine. The problem ended up being a loose M.2 SSD. You can read all about my fiasco here: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/...-a-6700-xt-with-very-strange-behavior.325064/
2) I had a Shuttle FS50C motherboard that was not POSTing, and I thought I could fix it by reflowing it. I put it in the oven for <10 min, and when I pulled it out the whole kitchen smelled horrific. It wasn't even a burnt plastic smell or anything. It was so bad I had to open the windows on a 31 °F/ -0.5 °C winter day. The icing on the cake is that reflowing it didn't fix the board. RIP

 

[Prime2515102]

I accidentally returned a motherboard to Amazon with an SSD still in the M.2 slot with everything installed on it. That was pretty stupid.

It worked out good though: they said they couldn't get it back so they sent me a replacement, then ended up returning the original to me anyway. I'm running them in RAID0 now.

 

[Bill_Bright]

Not me personally, but I was training (and supposed to be supervising) a new tech on installing a new Motorola mobile radio in the trunk of a brand new police car. Note our shop had an indoor garage just for installing and troubleshooting radios in emergency response vehicles.

I pointed out the ideal location for the 4 mounting holes on the trunk floor, ensured he had the right size drill bit and had the template sitting right, then went back to my bench while he drilled the holes and mounted the mounting bracket. We then went on to run the harness, control head, antenna, etc. Tested the system, and turned it back over to the PD motor pool.

Two days later, we got a call from the PD motor pool chief. It seems on the next patrol shift, they filled the car with fuel and immediately started to smell gas fumes, big time in the car and quickly returned it to motor pool. Their mechanics inspected the fuel system, pump, filler tube, and fuel lines - all good. So they ended up dropping the fuel tank where they immediately discovered 4 holes drilled into the tank that exactly matched the 4 holes in the trunk floor!

It seems my trainee drilled through the trunk floor just fine, but kept going and hit resistance when hitting the fuel tank top. Note the tank was located a good inch below the trunk bottom. But instead of stopping after going through the trunk floor, he kept on drilling until he drilled through the top of the tank too - then did that 3 more times.

Note the radio's mounting bracket screws, which he had with him, where just 1/2 inch long.

Why a spark from the drill didn't blow up the car, our shop, and everyone around, I don't know. Someone was watching over us that day. So my stupidity for assuming my trainee would know to stop drilling after he poked through the trunk floor. That never happened again.

***

For me personally, I was about 8 or 9 years old and already interested in electronics. I found an old radio somewhere that looked like it had been dropped more than once. But I wanted to see if it still worked. So I plugged it in, played with the knobs, slapped it around a bit and, no. It was dead.

I decided it was not worth keeping and to just throw it away. But first, I wanted to keep the power cord because... well... "I might need it someday!"

I went and got one of my dad's dikes and snipped the cord. That is when I quickly discovered I forgot the other end of the cord was still plugged into the wall. Lucky for me, I squeezed hard and fast to cut the cord so the circuit opened nearly as quick as the short I created. A valuable lesson learned I still vividly recall to this day every time I'm about to cut a wire, to ensure I am not about to make the same stupid mistake.

 

[GerKNG]

i wash my GPUs.

 

[Shrek]

But that's not stupid.

 

[JIWIL]

It seems my trainee drilled through the trunk floor just fine, but kept going and hit resistance when hitting the fuel tank top. Note the tank was located a good inch below the trunk bottom. But instead of stopping after going through the trunk floor, he kept on drilling until he drilled through the top of the tank too - then did that 3 more times.

The drill zone. Ain't nothin gonna stop me.

All the electrical cord stories remind me of one time I was maybe 10-12 years old, vacuuming with an old Hoover (~50's era, the kind with fabric sheathing on the power cord). I went to unplug but grabbed it by the cord at the base of the plug. I did end up on my ass. Grab the plug people.

 

[Yukikaze]

Many years ago, one of the first times when I did overclocking, I had a pretty el cheapo MSI P45 motherboard and a Q6600. I was young, inexperienced and had no bloody idea what VRMs (and/or VRM cooling) were at the time, and I happily pushed the damn thing past anything that was reasonable.

The VRMs caught fire and I crispified about 60% of them into charcoal.

Amazingly, nothing else died, I got a new mobo, and the system ran for years afterwards.

I learned an important lesson about electronic combustibility.

 

[GerKNG]

But that's not stupid.

two are dead...

 

[Shrek]

I wash my boards all the time with isopropyl alcohol.

Did you use dishwasher detergent?

 

[GerKNG]

i wash them just like dishes, with detergent for many years (motherboards too) but for some reason this time a 780 died (was from a heavy smoker and impossible to clean otherwise) and a Vega 64 just refuses to post.
i have washed easily 40-50 GPUs in the last 5 years and all were working... except this time

 

[Princess Garnet]

Two come to mind. Both were a very long time ago, around the same time as well. Want to guess when I was new and clueless? At least I'm only one of those things now.

What I did: Plugged the PSU and motherboard together incorrectly.

What went bad: The Motherboard and/or PSU.

The story of that...

Spoiler

I had disassembled and reassembled my first PC a couple of times by now. Note that I was not the one who originally assembled it. It was some custom PC that my step-father's friend gave to me. The motherboard was unusual, although I didn't know it at the time. It had a lot of legacy things for its time. It was a Gigabyte GA-6VA7+ which to save you from looking it up, was a socket 370 motherboard but it still had things like ISA slots, the I/O was nothing was a single AT keyboard connector (no PS/2, no USB, no other connectors, although it had headers for ribbon cable attachments for some things), and the power connector was your choice of AT or 20-pin ATX. My PSU happened to use the former.

AT power connectors were a pair of connectors. They were not unique, so you could plus them in backwards. I apparently had done just that, and I must had been lucky the first two or three times I did it.

The good news is that there was no disastrous damage done (no sparks, no flash, no noise, no smoke, etc.), other than the fact that the PSU or motherboard never powered up and worked again. I never figured out which one, possible both, failed, since I never had an alternative to test with.

I saved up $100 and bought a Dell Dimension 4100 on eBay after that. The Pentium III 800 MHz it had felt twice as fast as the Celeron 633 MHz the first PC had. That was where I started to realize what people said about certain numbers not being all there was to PC performance.

I carried forward the graphics card (faster than what the Dell came with) and hard drive (twice the capacity the Dell came with), maybe some RAM, so most of the stuff survived.

The second, and less disastrous, was the following.

What I did: Overheated some component on a hard drive PCB.

What went bad: The hard drive.

The story of that...

Spoiler

An old graphics card had a composite output, so I wanted to try connecting it to my TV. Before HDMI, the idea of a PC connected to a TV was a lot more novel. I had enough parts to make a temporary PC... minus the case. I didn't want to set the stuff on the carpet, so I used some cardboard.

The details are fuzzy on why I did the next part because of how long ago it was, but I used a PCI slot cover to keep the hard drive in place. It may have been due to cable length and wanting to keep it up off the motherboard or something else, and I really can't remember. The PCI slot cover just happened to be the nearest thing that worked for whatever I was trying to do.

I ended up using it and everything was working fine until maybe 10 to 15 minutes in. I started smelling a faint but growing smell around the same time the PC just froze visually. What happened was the metal of the PCI slot cover was in contact with some component on the PCB of the hard drive, and it was apparently overheating. The part was even turning a bit Red. I turned the PC off, let it cool down, and... that was that. The hard drive had failed, but there was no other loss. It was a spare 10 GB drive that I wasn't using anyway, but it has taught me to be a lot more careful with what could be in contact with what on a running PC.

 

[Visible Noise]

Did the old "my hand will work as a heatsink for 10 seconds" to post test a board.
Burned a pentium 4 shaped square into my palm at second 11.

Ouch

 

[freeagent]

My first hardware upgrade was a stick of ram that was not fully inserted.. PC133 shot a spark. My HP was fine though.. Asus made a tank of a board back then. Not sure what I did with that system.. I should have kept it.

 

[Sithaer]

First NVMe drive ever, forgot to install the standoff into the mobo and then screwed it down like that. I was like huh thats a little bent but okay if it works.
Worked it did but when I've tried to remove it I genuinely couldn't like nothing would get it/catch on it like it was glued to the mobo or something.
Took a small plier from our garage and managed to slowly unscrew it with that but meanwhile I've also managed to scratch the drive and ofc it ended up dead. 'For the record that was a 1TB drive when they were still quite expensive..'