Post your first FAIL

"It looks like the same socket"
*sigh* to be young again.

 

Hmmm, too much n00b fails happened to me to remember my first, all the bent s478 P4 pins, fan blades accidental finger wedge, shorted components etc... but i remember a few

*-Once i thought it was a good idea to remove all heatsinks on a gfx card and "re-paste" them ,card was a leadtek winfast geforce3 and yes the ramsinks were glued on :shadedshu
the chips didn't come off with the heatsink but there was enough force to make a few pins come off tho, the card worked but all i saw was stripes on the screen = dead card.

*-Another mishap with a gfx car was when a screwdriver slipped and snapped a capacitor off, it was an MSI geforce 4Ti 4800se but that was fixed and it worked fine,
another time with the same card i was putting it in a different pc and apparently didn't mount correctly, it wouldn't boot so took it apart to find out that the 3.3v lines on the 20-pin mobo connector got so hot that the wires got crispy and browned the socket,
luckily nothing got damaged but had to re solder a new 20-pin to the psu and everything worked, but last year i tried to run that card and it showed a messed up screen= probably dead too

*-7300GT + Ramsinks i glued on + tried to remove = ram chip in my hand

*-Was going to replace TIM on a mobo chipset, original was all over the chipset and while cleaning it noticed a few hard spots and like an idiot forced my way into them for later thy turned out to be small surface mounted caps on the chipset :facepalm:
tried to solder couple of them but lost one or two, strange thing it worked fine without them?

lesson learned too late? be extra "paranoid" careful when working on a PC and do a redundant check when finished.

-Pardon the long story above-

 

I haven't had a fail. I am on PC #1, and I did tons of research first so I anticipate success.

 

My first "Fail" had to be, trying to use one of those Ultra X-Connect power supplies.... I think it lasted two days or so before it popped, and took out my fan controller (the controller still provided power for my fans, but I lost all ability to control fan speed). Never again have I used a "cheap" (not to be confused with inexpensive) power supply.

 

Cracked the die mounting a heatsink on an old Athlon.

In hindsight, I should've mounted the HSF before putting the motherboard in the case, easier to see if it's level that way.

 

During the AMD Barton days. I sleeved a whole psu with uv orange neon pet. I wired wrong red and yellows on all the molex and killed my a7n8x board, but got an rma got a new board. The psu still worked when I rewired the molex plugs. It recently wore out few years ago.Also was the 1st psu to feature active pfc from thermaltake I believe. cpu still works too.

 

Eh, I have to repost my fails every now and then.

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41746

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=38153

 

Ha I remember both of those. The second one makes me nervous about going to TEC's...may end up doing chilled water instead.

 

wow, I was looking for a good pc roast recipe.

 

I had a Sapphire motherboard take a processor out and said, "It could not have been the board."

Put another chip in and it took that one out too.

 

Sapphire boards are the worst , made by pc chips.The lowest of the low quality at that time prolly still are.

 

First fail? I was born on earth, and now I work all my life to repair that...

 

All you have to do with TECs is actually install the fail-safes. I didn't, and paid the price. lol.

 

LOL, this was recent but Sapphire replaced the chips.

 

Then you do not belong in this thread Why boast about it

 

His day is coming

 

My first, and thus far, last catastrophic failure was when I had my Biostar TF720 A2+, a cheap AM2+ motherboard, paired with a Phenom 9500. The board only officially supported up to 95w processors, and the Phenom 9500 was already 95w out of the box. Not knowing this, I attempted to overclock that processor. I don't remember what speed or what voltage, but whatever it was, it amounted to drawing around 125w. One night I ran an OCCT Linpack test on the new settings, and I noticed the computer shut off. Tired, I slept through it and figured I would mess with it the next day.

The next day, I couldn't get the machine to come back on. After some investigation I noticed the area around the VRMs was burned out. After getting an RMA on the board, along with a new processor (simply assuming the 9500 was dead without testing it, another fail), I noticed the failure also took my 9800GT, the fastest graphics card I ever owned at the time, with it. It took a while to recover from that one, not having the money I do now to throw at hardware.

I tell you one thing though, any overclocks I did with that board I religiously checked out with the overclocker's TDP formula and made sure whatever I was running didn't go over 95w. I also had those little blue Zalman ramsinks on the VRMs as a little extra help.

 

straight bolt first systems mobo to the case no risers get on my level

 

I've killed a DVD RW with a bad flash back when they were a bit more expensive. Also, plugging in AGP 1 cards into later slots (different voltages) was something I used to do a fair bit when I used to work for MSI tech support. Nasty.

 

My first...

When I first had 2 PC's one was reaching high temperature's and I knew that swapping the CPU fans around on the systems would be an ideal solution, so went ahead and got the first one swapped over to let another family member back on the PC to do whatever they do whilst I go and fit the other fan on the other PC...

All is well on the 2nd PC, however that family member soon comes to find me saying "your computer won't load" so obviously I ask the basic questions "have you tried restarting" and so on "yes" was the reply I got shortly followed by "It smells like it's burning too", "how long has it been like that" I replied which in response I got "since you left it" bare in mind this is around 15 - 20 minutes later. So I go rushing downstairs to the PC, by the way even at the top of the stairs I could smell what was clearly burnt plastic

So what did I find? Just my PC stuck at the boot screen with everyone just sat there watching the TV... Clever huh

All in all I got lucky and it only blown the CPU with a slight burn mark left behind on the motherboard which still worked perfectly until was no longer needed.

 

I dropped a hard drive off a table, and dented the floor, then while looking at the dent I hit my head on the table and knocked over my other hard drive. I then dropped the first hard drive again while putting the second one on the table. I needed new hard drives after that. DERP

 

next hard drive use rubber gloves for grip and helmet for head.

 

That's not normal, I've done it dozens of times and all that happens is the floppy drive read/write light stays on solid

My worst was with an old GeForce 6600 AGP card which I was going to LN2. I'd taken the cooler off and insulated the card, put it into the old Barton and booted into the BIOS to make sure everything was ready. The motherboard was on a chair with the PSU on a table just above it. Once I was in the BIOS I saw that some settings were wrong (NB voltage and so on) so I started correcting them - forgetting that the card doesn't have a cooler. A minute or two in, a nice bright FLAME (not spark) came from an SMD just above the core and scorched the PSU wires coming from the table down to the rig - the wires were about 20cm above the rig. The card had a lovey, thick black scorch mark from the SMD to the top of the card, and the PSU wires caught in the line on fire (pun intended ) were also nicely blackened.

Another bad fail was when I first took a Phenom (X4 940 I think) sub zero, my first time "accidentally" using a chip without a cold bug as I was expecting one. Needless to say, I didn't know just how much of the board needed to be insulated, and only prepped it for about -40'c. I didn't have a working temperature probe, so I was planning to take things by ear and kept topping up with a splash of LN2 every minute or two until I realised the pot was full Awesome, time to do some decent benching This is the result:



Whoops, that resulted in a dead graphics card not too long after :/

And



A dead network port. Faaaark. It wasn't even my board :/

 

I bought my first graphics card PCI EX 16, thinking that the PCI Express x16 merely as a new technology in the graphics card and not that it is the connecting interface ....

I realized only after i got home the new graphics card that i had a AGP 8X only motherboard ...

I just wanted to play Day of Defeat from steam at decent framerates.

Fckin noob !!

 

After disassembling my laptop to see if I could clean it, I forgot to reconnect the fan when I reassembled it. My habit of running temp monitoring made me spot it fairly quickly. No damage done fortunately.