Stupid things one has done with hardware

[Princess Garnet]

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.

I consider myself lucky that to this day, I've yet to see anything like this. I've never seen a spark, flash, or smoke, nor have I heard a pop noise, from my PC. Or at the least, none that I can recall as of now.

But it's something that I figure has to be coming eventually, so when I got my current graphics card, I had a scare where I thought that had happened. It has an RGB light bar on it, but I keep it turned off. When I turn my PC off, there's typically a brief moment where it flashes White. That terrified me the first time. It was night and my living room was mostly dark, I was turning the PC off for the night, and after I turned the monitor off and was heading to go to my room, suddenly there's a flash behind me.

 

[freeagent]

nor have I heard a pop noise,

That came from my Antec NeoPower 480 lol.. was testing an overclock with my 4400 Toledo and it popped on 12v2 iirc.

It was loud

 

[Dr. Dro]

Original GTX Titan + putting 500 W through it with an Accelero Xtreme IV. Costly mistake. Not my first, not my last hardware "murder case", though. Lock me up... or learn with the mistakes I've made. For science.

 

[Noci]

Back in '93 of last century, bought my first PC hardware, that pretty much was the most stupid thing .

Got addicted messing around with it and kept on buying new tech ever since.
Afraid I'll be a hardware junky for life

 

[Jtuck9]

A rich mans game and I'm all the poorer for it, although rich in experience!

- Put too much pressure on a water block, which ended up cracking and leaking (and oxidizing?!) (turned green) my motherboard.

- Plugged a network cable into the wrong port on a switch causing a feedback loop and ended up crashing an entire network.

- Running Raid 0 arrays seemed pretty foolish on my hardware at the time, lost a fair bit of data. Skyrim used to boot in like half a second on an old Crucial SSD array I had.

- Recently had to botch a side panel as my calculations were off...

 

[Kwadratowicz]

I've plugged usb C cable to usb A slot in motherboard, and the shroud of usb c shorted the pins, fortunately protection kicked in and I've only get shut down from pc .

 

[maxfly]

Unknowingly nicked a Sunon 92mm fan cable while cutting off a bunch of cable ties. The fan cables plastic flash fried in a perfect hellish line when I powered up the rig. It was pretty sweet... yes, it scared the crap outta me.

 

[Chomiq]

Me looking at socket cover for old B75 motherboard after disassembly and switch to AM4:
- I think I remember how to replace it, no need to check the manual
* proceeds to install the socket cover the wrong way and bends the pins *

 

[Kwadratowicz]

When I was cutting out zipties, I cut the cable from the power supply to the speakers, luckily it was DC 12v, not AC 230V, and the power supply was not connected to outlet.

 

[Chomiq]

When I was cutting out zipties, I cut the cable from the power supply to the speakers, luckily it was DC 12v, not AC 230V, and the power supply was not connected to outlet.

I never bother with zipties while doing the wiring - twist ties FTW.

 

[Nuckles56]

View attachment 407716

My drone got attacked by seagulls at around 35m of height. The drone got into an imbalance and crashed into a building. From there it lost signal or contact and dropped 30m's high from the sky, in a nicely perfect spot for me to find it lol. The casing is cracked, blocking one rotor. I heard parts inside actually move around and managed to get the GPS sensor out (it came out of somewhere).

Drone can be fixed but it's cheaper to buy a new one, which i'm planning todo. This drone was a great experience but now i want a bigger one that reached 86mph or 140kmph. The part your looking at is this:

Part of the GPS sensor; it's needed to fly above 30m of heigh up to 75m.

I have a similar story, with a mavic 3, where I was flying it on a very hot day (over 40C) as a way to check on things without needing to go out of the A/C. I was flying it a pretty long way away (like ~2-2.5km away) from me by then and I had just told it to return home, when the controller just lost signal. Turns out, something got too hot in the unit, most likely the battery, and shut off, leading to the whole thing dropping out of the sky and falling somewhere around 200m to the ground. It took a while to find it, and when I did, it was missing 3 of the 4 rotor arms, the camera gimbal was torn off and the battery had popped out. Fortunately the battery pack had survived unscathed, and has kept on flying for about another 5 years.

 

[Sithaer]

Original GTX Titan + putting 500 W through it with an Accelero Xtreme IV. Costly mistake. Not my first, not my last hardware "murder case", though. Lock me up... or learn with the mistakes I've made. For science.

Did you get at least some benchmarks out of it before frying it?
I'm not that much of a overclocker myself but I do find such stuff interesting regardless. 'I've pushed my 5070 as far as I could but this is still basic stuff'

Also this is a fun topic, funny to see that we are all tech nerds here and still pretty much all of us made some dumb mistakes before. 'Accidentally or not'

 

[Dr. Dro]

Did you get at least some benchmarks out of it before frying it?
I'm not that much of a overclocker myself but I do find such stuff interesting regardless. 'I've pushed my 5070 as far as I could but this is still basic stuff'

Also this is a fun topic, funny to see that we are all tech nerds here and still pretty much all of us made some dumb mistakes before. 'Accidentally or not'

Quite a few, although now also lost to time... there was a way to increase the voltage to achieve even higher clocks by programming the VRM IC directly through MSI Afterburner using a command line, and a 1000 W-capable BIOS from an engineering sample was also posted, that's how I yeeted my card into heaven

 

[Shrek]

That came from my Antec NeoPower 480 lol.. was testing an overclock with my 4400 Toledo and it popped on 12v2 iirc.

It was loud

Your fault? or should the power supply have shut itself down?

 

[freeagent]

Your fault? or should the power supply have shut itself down?

I think it should have shut down. I was running Prime 95, so not a big deal. I had no idea I was at the limit of the PSU. Ever since then I do not buy split rails

 

[FoulOnWhite]

My dad was once fixing a CRT TV about 198x. he asked my stepmother if it was unplugged, "yes" she said. Well it wasn't. My dad was thrown across the room breaking a coffee table. The Ambulance crew said it could have killed him.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

Replacing the screen on my Pixel 3 XL. They used a tremendous amount of glue to hold the two parts together - I suppose for the waterproofing. I had a new phone, but I wanted to recover its data. Has a bunch of pictures I never backed up to anywhere.

I had it almost all the way apart, and was bending the frame away from the screen. It was oddly stuck in one corner.

Crunch.

I had missed a screw.

Broke a corner off of the motherboard. RIP.

 

[Princess Garnet]

My dad was once fixing a CRT TV about 198x. he asked my stepmother if it was unplugged, "yes" she said. Well it wasn't. My dad was thrown across the room breaking a coffee table. The Ambulance crew said it could have killed him.

This is the second time someone posted something like this so I'll add my own similar experience.

When I was between the ages of 5 and 10 (probably near the middle or end of that range), I was plugging in either a TV (an old floor model with a wooden exterior) or a Nintendo console (the original one). I had done this many times before. Apparently my finger contacted the metal plug while doing so because I ended up from one end of the room near the middle. I wasn't "thrown", but rather I sort of spun around repeatedly backwards until I reached the couch. At least, that's what those who witnessed it said. I do vaguely remember it occurring but I thought I just kind of stumbled straight back rather than spinning.

Witnesses were at least one sibling and one parent (maybe both, or maybe the other showed up after the commotion). My sister was in awe and confused, and my mother was panicking. My step father tried to calm her down, mostly because of the old "don't panic or it will make the kid panic" but they said I just remained calm but confused. I definitely remember the hospital visit afterwards that evening and being confused as to why I had to go, and bored because of it (when you're young, you go to doctors a lot for check ups and shots so you get used to the visits being a thing, but you are still confused and bored about them). I was checked out fine.

I was not allowed to touch plugs until I was a bit older.

 

[Apocalypsee]

I mod a SM3623+SM5843+PCM58 DAC around 2006-2007 while I modding one day I didn't turn off the power because I wanted to check something real quick, and my right hand accidentally slip to one of the transformer. I felt like a sledgehammer hitting that hand, it was numb for about 30 minutes lock in that one position.

Also, when modding X-Fi Elite Pro back then, I have no idea why the sound that comes out of the speaker is mono, I tried fixing it many times and from repeatedly soldering and desoldering destroyed the analog out of the card, only to find out the mono selector is ON at the amplifier. Biggest facepalm of my life . But I managed to fix it, by jumping the front channel to another channel illustrates on photo below. The red box analog out is totally broken with exposed PCB layer and damaged trace, so I jumped the 4 caps from front channel to middle channel by a thin wire illustrates by orange line.

 

[RaceT3ch]

I've plugged usb C cable to usb A slot in motherboard, and the shroud of usb c shorted the pins, fortunately protection kicked in and I've only get shut down from pc .

I've had this happen to me as well lol.

 

[Canned Noodles]

I got the two AT power connectors on a socket 7 motherboard mixed up. BANG! I replaced the board with a much nicer one. This was last July.

 

[hat]

I've got two hardware deaths that come to mind:

1. Nvidia XFX 6800XT and Intel D865PERL motherboard. This was a monster of a card compared to the FX 5200 Ultra I was upgrading from. It also required a new power supply, which was an Antec Smartpower 2.0. That particular model power supply was notorious for coil whine, and boy did mine have it. I nearly went mad swapping back and forth between the 6800XT and my old 5200 Ultra, as for some reason I wouldn't really get the whine with the old card. Eventually, somehow I blew the card and traces for the AGP port. This taught me the value of a good power supply. My next power supply was a Corsair VX450.

2. Phenom x4 9500 and Biostar TF720 A2+. I was upgrading from a 7750BE. I had more cores, but I couldn't quite touch the same clocks I had with the 7750BE. The more I pushed, the more unstable things got, so the more voltage I needed, naturally. Unfortunately, I didn't know (or bother to check) that the board was only rated for up to 95w processors, and I was well over that limit, and I burnt the VRMs. I assumed (but never tested) the CPU was also toast, so in the bin it went, and I wound up replacing the board and going back to my 7750BE for a while. This taught me to always check what my board is capable of doing, and not to cheap out on junk boards with crappy VRMs.

 

[Bill_Bright]

Antec Smartpower 2.0

This taught me the value of a good power supply. My next power supply was a Corsair VX450.

I certainly would not claim the Antec Smartpower 2.0 was a top-tier model. Neither did Antec for that matter, as it was marketed as their basic, "mainstream" line. Essentially, their "entry-level" line.

But not sure I would call a supply from Corsair's "VX" line a step up or a "good power supply" either as the VX line (now discontinued) was indeed, their bottom tier, "entry-level" line of PSUs too.

I am glad you learned that valuable lesson of using a good PSU since EVERYTHING inside the computer case depends on good, clean, power. But I suspect, in this case, you misinterpreted the symptoms but fortunately, still came to the proper conclusion.

If I had to guess what happened, I would say the Antec might have been faulty, showing its age, or, more likely perhaps, considering the XFX 6800XT was a power hog (TPU suggested 700W, XFX recommends 750W minimum power supplies), the Antec could not take the abuse demanded of it, and choked.

Let me quickly add, you said you "blew the traces for the AGP port". The card I referenced from TPU and XFX uses the "PCIe" interface, not "AGP". So maybe not the same card? If not, then apologies.

 

[hat]

I certainly would not claim the Antec Smartpower 2.0 was a top-tier model. Neither did Antec for that matter, as it was marketed as their basic, "mainstream" line. Essentially, their "entry-level" line.

But not sure I would call a supply from Corsair's "VX" line a step up or a "good power supply" either as the VX line (now discontinued) was indeed, their bottom tier, "entry-level" line of PSUs too.

I am glad you learned that valuable lesson of using a good PSU since EVERYTHING inside the computer case depends on good, clean, power. But I suspect, in this case, you misinterpreted the symptoms but fortunately, still came to the proper conclusion.

If I had to guess what happened, I would say the Antec might have been faulty, showing its age, or, more likely perhaps, considering the XFX 6800XT was a power hog (TPU suggested 700W, XFX recommends 750W minimum power supplies), the Antec could not take the abuse demanded of it, and choked.

Let me quickly add, you said you "blew the traces for the AGP port". The card I referenced from TPU and XFX uses the "PCIe" interface, not "AGP". So maybe not the same card? If not, then apologies.

Wrong 6800XT. Note I specified Nvidia 6800XT. As for the VX450, that power supply was made by Seasonic, and was a fantastic unit in its time if you weren't running ridiculous overclocks or SLI or something. Note that these, along with the HX units, were the units Corsair entered the market with. You may be thinking of the budget CX series that came later.