Broken Hardwares

[Hyderz]

Which pc parts has abruptly died in your hands?
Can be from overclocking, dead on arrival, wear and tear, bad installation

Let me know your story
how long have you had it?, was it expensive? etc

i had an amd athlon xp 2400+, i cracked the cpu with thermaltake cooler
had it for 2 years and i had to fork out $200 for another

 

[EarthDog]

Ive been in this game for a long time... all that you have listed has died on me at some point or some reason over the last 20+ years.

EDIT: Not sure what you are trying to get out of this 'poll', but surely most everyone has had most everything die if you been using PC's long enough.........(I didn't vote).

 

[HUSKIE]

I did vote. all of the above. Randomly parts? can't count since 1997 till now.

 

[hat]

Graphics Card:
9800GT: died due to a careless overclocking accident. VRMs on the board blew. When I got a replacement, the 9800GT that was installed in the system at the time would artifact even in the BIOS.
9600GSO: was a folding@home card, died randomly after some time

Storage: Had a 2TB WD Caviar Green drive and a 500GB Caviar Black drive die.

Motherboard:
Intel D865PERL: AGP port fried after repeated swapping back and forth between FX5200 Ultra and 6800XT. I upgraded to the 6800XT, but a new power supply was required. It was an Antec Smartpower 2.0. Apparently that unit has a pretty bad rap... mine had hella coil whine when I used the 6800XT. It didn't with the FX5200 Ultra, hence the repeated graphics card swapping...
Biostar TF720 A2+: Died when I tried to overclock and overvolt a Phenom 9500. This is what killed the 9800GT listed above.

Power Supply:
Had a really cheap 500w power supply, I believe it was an Enermax unit... just up and died one day. It was powering a crunching/folding system.

 

[HUSKIE]

More watching.. Don't be shy...

 

[eidairaman1]

Athlon XP 3200, cracked die from modding tension clip, killed my crucial balistix tracer pc3200 kit (esd), 2 power supplies died on me, killed my ATi Radeon 9700 pro All In Wonder by trying to remove adapter cable and use regular floppy power. Killed a HIS x1950 Pro 512 AGP with a screw falling on it. Had a 80GB IBM Deskstar Die, Had a Sony CDRW drive causing the system to boot slow. Flashed a Dell M18 GPU trying to get additional pixel pipes unlocked, it bricked and irrepairable.

Had a 120mm antec led fan die

My First SB ZxR was DOA.

 

[killster1]

Ive been in this game for a long time... all that you have listed has died on me at some point or some reason over the last 20+ years.

EDIT: Not sure what you are trying to get out of this 'poll', but surely most everyone has had most everything die if you been using PC's long enough.........(I didn't vote).

how do you know if it died in your hands or was DOA? only thing that has died for me are hard drives, most likely from vibration or being beaten by children while in use or clumsy ex knocking somthing over. everything else well i guess im lucky just a opteron 939 that wouldnt overclock while being undervolted after a few years of use would be worst that has happened. i retire hardware after a few years and it gets hung up on the wall, thinking really hard what has died on me, i guess a few mice again from children handling them cable needed to be replaced, moms computer that i built had psu go out but all hardware continued to work, few sets of DDR2 DOA. usually i buy used to avoid DOA. few case fans died chipset fans died, must be very unlucky if it ALL happened to you. how do cpu's die tightened down to much, run with out heatsink? oh wait maybe a nvidia 6700 vanilla that i flashed to another card and overclocked eventually gave artifacts.

 

[EarthDog]

how do you know if it died in your hands or was DOA?

Well, if I opened the box up and it was dead, that is DOA. If I plugged it in and it died later, that is in my hands.

 

[Hyderz]

Ive been in this game for a long time... all that you have listed has died on me at some point or some reason over the last 20+ years.

EDIT: Not sure what you are trying to get out of this 'poll', but surely most everyone has had most everything die if you been using PC's long enough.........(I didn't vote).

well its to see which parts would break, just gives me an idea parts and brands to look out for and how to install/handle parts properly. (generally)
its a learning poll for me , like a do and don't around computers

 

[Susquehannock]

Not too much.

Killed motherboard ..... nForce2 era. Had a Soltek FRN2-RL die on me. No visible signs of failure but was while extreme overclocking with the OCZ 'DDR booster' that powered the RAM slots direct from the PSU. Have a couple more of same board still. One that has never been powered up.

DOA graphics cards .... back in 2007 I got three dead BFG 7800gs cards in a row from NewEgg. Fan and lights worked. Nothing else. Apparently BFG was sending out a bunch of bad cards. Many same complaints. Worst part was they and the Egg kept passing the buck on reimbursement of the near $100 return fees with shipping insurance that I incurred. Finally gave up after about a year. On the plus side the 4th 7800gs they sent worked like a charm, and still does residing in board mentioned above.

[edit]

Forgot to mention the 40gb Maxtor HDD failure. Large chip on the side burned up about two months after purchase. From what I saw on the forums I was not alone. Replacement from manufacturer went smoothly.

 

[EarthDog]

well its to see which parts would break, just gives me an idea parts and brands to look out for and how to install/handle parts properly. (generally)
its a learning poll for me , like a do and don't around computers

Ahh.. ok.. well. Anecdotes from a forum, even of this size, isn't really going to give you an advantage. Everyone has horror stories where others are fine and vice versa. There are sites online that give a vague (but 100x better than this poll and user anecdotes) a vague idea like (hardware.fr, some backblaze reports for HDDs, etc). Typically, with most hardware, failure rates are incredibly low... to the low single digits for most. There are some which may be troublesome, but it isn't like a 20% thing, even.

I'd rather sweat out a choice on power supply than to sift through anecdotes and what this poll tells you. All parts fail at some points. The difference between average and great is so small you likely wouldn't believe it.

I you want a do's and don'ts I'm not sure this will accomplish such a thing. Maybe take a look at an A+ book if you want to know hardware and how to handle or install it. Youtube vids... etc.

 

[Capitan Harlock]

When i received my first ever pc in 2002 i was 14 and the psu in it was a generic psu with a 220v to 120v switch XD.
Out of curiosity i remember to have switched the voltage and puff . Luckly only the psu broke and was under warranty so got replaced .
When your without knowledge

 

[hat]

Agreed. Also, if that's the idea of the poll, there's a fatal flaw: there's no options for how many of each component in question we've had die on us. I've had multiple fatal issues with 3 out of 4 of the options I chose. In fact, I've just remembered I've had more than one power supply fail on me as well. Anyway, the point is just selecting yes or no if I've had an issue with video cards doesn't paint the full picture you're looking for.

That said, in my experience, I've had parts just fail, and I've had parts fail because I basically killed them. Unintentionally, but the magic smoke is still on my hands. That Biostar board probably would still be functional today if I didn't try to overvolt a hungry quad core on it (it was a budget board with weak VRMs). On the other hand, I didn't do anything special to the hard drive I've had die on me, they just died.

If you just want to learn how to properly build a computer and handle components, there's a lot of resources out there for that. Members on this very forum would be happy to offer advice.

I started with this guide back in the day. Unfortunately, many of the pictures are now gone, and the guide references things like IDE cables which you're probably not going to see much of in 2020, unless you're working on older systems. That said, I started here, and the rest is all experience I've picked up hanging around this forum and continuing my hobby. And things have changed, like the aforementioned IDE cable. In fact, I recently had an issue with a build I just did. I bought a SATA M.2 SSD, expecting it to work, and only after the system failed to recognize the drive did I learn that there are M.2 slots that will only accept the PCI-E type of drive...

 

[Hyderz]

Ahh.. ok.. well. Anecdotes from a forum, even of this size, isn't really going to give you an advantage. Everyone has horror stories where others are fine and vice versa. There are sites online that give a vague (but 100x better than this poll and user anecdotes) a vague idea like (hardware.fr, some backblaze reports for HDDs, etc). Typically, with most hardware, failure rates are incredibly low... to the low single digits for most. There are some which may be troublesome, but it isn't like a 20% thing, even.

I'd rather sweat out a choice on power supply than to sift through anecdotes and what this poll tells you. All parts fail at some points. The difference between average and great is so small you likely wouldn't believe it.

I you want a do's and don'ts I'm not sure this will accomplish such a thing. Maybe take a look at an A+ book if you want to know hardware and how to handle or install it. Youtube vids... etc.

hehe i know it wont cover everything but that's okay because i like to read people's horror hardware stories and sometimes its amazing the simple solution people do to fix computer hardwares. I really appreciate the TPU community feedbacks.

 

[Chomiq]

That stupid socket cover for Intel...

 

[potato580+]

i have plenty cards died by my own hand, mostly fans tear while i clean it, not rly broken tho, well consider fans died

 

[Vayra86]

I think HDDs are top of the list for me over all these years. The amount of times a major issue was attributable to storage is higher than any other.

But overall, I can't say things die often. Except HDDs. Basically any moving part is just going to wear down and die eventually. The electrical ones you can influence a lot more with temps, cleanliness and usage, and even fixing is possible; more voltage for example, some soldering.

 

[Chomiq]

I think HDDs are top of the list for me over all these years. The amount of times a major issue was attributable to storage is higher than any other.

But overall, I can't say things die often. Except HDDs. Basically any moving part is just going to wear down and die eventually. The electrical ones you can influence a lot more with temps, cleanliness and usage, and even fixing is possible; more voltage for example, some soldering.

Speaking of HDD failure, you could also wipe the dust off your HDD with a microfiber cloth (stares in the mirror). That was years ago but it did happen.

 

[oobymach]

Reasons I don't like to water cool things include: One of my first pc builds (amd duron/athlon pre 1ghz age) died in my hands when water cooling it, sprung a leak and took the cpu and motherboard, smelled like cookies, all the little chips on the cpu die melted off. Air cooled ever since.

 

[witkazy]

Speaking of cookies back in a day had to bake Zotac 8800 gtx back to life .Lasted as long as guaranty on it.Avoiding brand and blower type gpu since

 

[TheMadDutchDude]

I've killed a fair amount of hardware...

Near golden status GTX 580 reference card with a faulty variable resistor mod.
ASRock Z170 OC Formula - this died by faulty components, widespread issue.
Intel Core i3-6320 (is that the highest one?) as a result of the above board dying.
SilverStone 1000w PSU - just died out of the blue.
OCZ 1200w Gold thingiemajig, died while booting an SoC based AMD system drawing 20w from the wall. Burnt out, melted one of the bigger caps.
Kingston DDR3 high performance SODIMM, 1333MHz C7 stuff - very hard to find.

One stick of DDR2 that was DOA, so I didn't kill it.

I *think* that's it. There's probably more, but that's all that springs to mind.

 

[Kapone33]

I will never forget my first modern PC build. It was a 965BE. I used an Ultra 700W modular BLUE LED 135MM fan PSU and the system was solid for a week before the PC would turn on but nothing would happen. I tool it to a tech and the the problem was the PSU. That taught me to only buy name brand reliable PSUs.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

I've been pretty lucky only a 7950 I was using as a place holder till I could get my hands on SLI 680s ever died on me after about a month of use. I haven't purchased a sapphire card since. I replaced it with an Asus 7970 DC2T

I typically don't keep hardware longer than 3 years so I've never had anything die on me from old age so far

 

[64K]

I guess I've been pretty lucky. I've only ever had a PSU go bad on me prematurely in my rigs since I started building my own in 2007.

It didn't really die it was just causing my PC to shut down and reboot every minute or so. So just as good as died. It wasn't a cheap PSU either. It was a Corsair HX 750 Watt.

 

[Kapone33]

I guess I've been pretty lucky. I've only ever had a PSU go bad on me prematurely in my rigs since I started building my own in 2007.

It didn't really die it was just causing my PC to shut down and reboot every minute or so. So just as good as died. It wasn't a cheap PSU either. It was a Corsair HX 750 Watt.

At least those have good warranty service.