What your worst PC build or mistake in bulid

[Salty_sandwich]

well I have to admit back when the R9 290x was hot chat, I wanted 2 of them for crossfire and messing around mining crypto...
in my hast to get hands on from shop they could only get the standard blower versions 2 for £800 back then lol
boy was that a mistake! the noise and heat they made (when being pushed flat out), was and i'm not joking, simply beyond stupid, I was shocked.

if i'm honest.. I wasn't about to allow, after 1 year of going deaf and die'n from dehydration get in the way of my pride lol

was glade to see the back of those cards ! really lol in a trade back to store after 1 year of having them give me my cash back (as I proved the had an issue) and supplied with 2 x 970

I thought well fantastic flat out gaming and not being made deaf and no heat stroke!

no that was short lived

in Sli with 3 x 1080p screens the they were well crap the 290x where better well sort of ..

2x r9 290x

the power they pulled

the system change with 2x 970's and change the cpu cooler

 

[Vayra86]

Heh. Well, that's easy, my worst mistake was going midrange GPUs in SLI. 2x GTX 660, stutter heaven.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Back in 2003/4 (or a little earlier, not exactly sure) I still had a floppy drive. I was building a system, and I couldn’t see very well into the back of the drive area (and was too lazy to lay the tower down for this step so I COULD see).

I plugged the FDD power cable from the PSU to the FDD, by feel. I turned on system to test and a puff of smoke burst out followed by the momentary 3 inch high flicker of orange flame!

I quickly pulled the power plug to PSU and investigated the damage. Other than a scorched area of the FDD plug area, there was no damage. Apparently all the prongs did not go into the plug, it was off-center by 1 row.

I just used the other FDD power cable and did it correctly, and everything worked after that! No damage to anything in the system! I just taped the burned cable back and never used it again.

 

[Salty_sandwich]

I used to run the system on 3 x 1080p at one point had 5 monitor's linked up to the system lol cant find any good pics atm

couple of bench tests

https://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8836384 2 x 970's these I got more or less day 1 they were released 1 card is good but sli was not that good had issues running above 3.5g with 2 cards back then super slid show

https://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8141418 2 x 290x's apart from making me deaf and giving me heat stroke oh and the display ports was faulty on both cards probs heat damage its self they ran games better in crossfire (they got the fire part correct in the name) than the 970's in sli

to be fair everything was completely over the top for what I needed, I decided that when I built an A10-6800k (that's what the 103 cooler above was for) with an gtx760

I was more impressed with what that little system could do, than what my top system couldn't do lol

A10-6800k + gtx760 https://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8013255

A10-6800k + 290x (tested it for fun) https://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8621475

oh and this what I live with now LOL https://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/12902614

 

[jallenlabs]

I once got my wedding ring snagged on a resister and popped it off a x1950xt back in the day. Solder it back on, but it was never the same. I always take my ring off now.

 

[hat]

So far, it's still overclocking a Phenom 9500 in the budget Biostar TF720 A2+ board. It worked, until I pushed the voltage too far and cooked the board. When I got my replacement board, I found out my shiny new 9800GT had also suffered...

 

[John Naylor]

Purchasing my son's Asus Sandy Bridge Workstation board ... crapped out 1 month before Xmas and even tho board qualified for premium service, (ON mail and they send replacement before you send old one back), took over 3 months to get a working board ... and all contact for the Asus RMA and Tech support came thru Pegatron.

Buying an EVGA triple slot dual GPU FTW card ... 18 months, 20 support calls, 5 RMAs

Most build related stuff just involved taking apart and doing again.

 

[Salty_sandwich]

I think my all time mistake was doing some free work at work for a charity , had to build 50 identical budget systems which didn't take that long it was installing O/S and drivers, so I had the bright idea of setting up the first PC and cloning the drive for all other PC's after all they are exactly the same parts, everything went as planed

they were all sent out to different places in UK on time fantastic phew

then the phone call

they were all using the same windows key :\ had go to everyplace and put correct key on system because they said they don't know how to change the key and was my issue :\ ffs they had the licence key sticker with the windows disk and OEM packaging ...

this was going back to around 2001

 

[Jetster]

Never really had a worst build
I dropped a AM1 CPU on the board and was so frustrated I threw both the CPU and Board in the trash
So I've never built an AM1 ssytem
This was my only attempt at Crossfire but it worked ok

 

[spectatorx]

Not much of a mistake but more likely being cheap: purchased 1333MHz ram for my fx-8320 cpu. At the time that was the only way to me to buy 16GB of ram.

 

[Salty_sandwich]

I got 4 x 4gig ddr3 1866 (vengeance pro) £112 (£56 each 8gig kit) around the end of 2013 cant remember the date exactly