Confessions of the System Builder...
- Thread starter VARDY
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Forgetting the atx 8 pin power cable is one that i forget quite often, that and the 8 pin power connector on my 280 gtx, after only ever using cards that require a single six pin connector im still getting used to the 8 pin pcie cable.
Soldato
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I often forget to plug power into the GFX card, old habits I guess....
Soldato
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was building a micro atx build spent ages forcing the DVD drive in the tight slots only to realise that there was a metal plate blocking my way i half pulled it back out then in frustration punched the damn thing down to the lower slot the case was an ASUS T 101S something like that was satisfying getting that bloody drive in i tell you
Soldato
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tryed to fit my 285GTX into my lian li case. In doing so i got it stuck under one of my hard drives and stupidly forced it out and wrecked a hard drive in the process.
The only way to fit this card in is to have 1 hard drive upside down in the highest slot possible in the HDD rack and another hard drive in the flioppy drive. My other hard drive is KIA but wouldn;t have fitted anyway.
Seriously, if you buy a card like this CHECK IT FITS!
The only way to fit this card in is to have 1 hard drive upside down in the highest slot possible in the HDD rack and another hard drive in the flioppy drive. My other hard drive is KIA but wouldn;t have fitted anyway.
Seriously, if you buy a card like this CHECK IT FITS!
Soldato
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modded a packard bell pc last month for my uni mate he was rendering with lightwave 3d and his Q6600(G0) was hitting 80c lol, cleaned all the dust out and it still was quiet high 60s considering it wasnt even using 100% cpu. got him to buy a akasa 965 cpu cooler had lots of faff getting it in at etc etc eventually it would boot with that cpu because it was different to the original crappy one used a molex to 3pin adapter which had to have its side snapped off so it could fit. plugged the old in the 4pin on the mobo and used it as a case fan so do say. because its running off a molex its always on max speed which aint pretty but his CPU doesnt go past 50c when rendering so happy days
Soldato
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I was trying to remove my hard drive from my old build but due to lack of space, I somehow ended up breaking the sata connection on the hard drive which got stuck in the cable.
I put some extra RAM in an old system, and the CD drive never worked after. I didn't bother opening up the case to check why.
Fast forward about 4 years to two weeks ago, I get that case down from the loft to try and get some photos off the hard drive, open it up, and there's an IDE cable not plugged into the motherboard properly/at all. Whoops.
Fast forward about 4 years to two weeks ago, I get that case down from the loft to try and get some photos off the hard drive, open it up, and there's an IDE cable not plugged into the motherboard properly/at all. Whoops.
I once scraped a blanking plate across the mobo while it was on and told the guy who ordered the system that I had to repolarise the RAMs magnetic alignment and would take a week because I had to borrow the tool off someone.
Secretly I ordered a new mobo and was too tight to pay for next day delivery!
Secretly I ordered a new mobo and was too tight to pay for next day delivery!
Associate
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Supprised you never told him you had to re-charge his flux capacitor
haha nice story though. Done plenty to my machines over the years, mainly from plugging things in while on, but never killed anything, actually thats a lie I remember using some 3.5" ide to 2.5" ide with power and connecting the 2.5" side wrong way round so it fed power to the wrong pins.
Soldato
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Oh, done a fair few stupid things over the years...
1. Forgotten to connect the CPU fan on a new build --> temp-induced shutdown three times over and much head-scratching.
2. Connected my front USB port with the power connectors on the wrong pins --> a little "pop," a distinct smell of burning, an error message I didn't read in time and a hard shut-down with much panicking. That USB header still doesn't work - gives a "device not recognised" error whatever is connected to it.
3. Got an "NTLDR is missing" error on trying to boot. Decided my boot sector must be corrupted. Cue literally hours and hours of trying to first repair the boot sector, then get booted up with a portable Linux distro so I could back up and reinstall. Finally just took my hard-drive out, stuck it in my other PC, backed up and began the reinstall... only to find out that the problem all along was that I'd somehow reset my BIOS and it had defaulted to using my second (IDE) drive as the primary boot device...
4. Decided to flash my BIOS on a new build. Grabbed the first floppy to hand - an ancient, dust-covered relic with several peeling labels and a half-disconnected metal slider. Predictably the file wasn't in perfect condition and the flash failed halfway through leaving me with a dead mobo.
5. Trying to speed up a friend's PC whilst very, very drunk. In "streamlining" his start-up items and services I must have set his RPC to disabled because his PC wouldn't work again until I could get back to London with a RPC repair on a floppy. He wasn't happy and hasn't let me "help" with his PC since.
1. Forgotten to connect the CPU fan on a new build --> temp-induced shutdown three times over and much head-scratching.
2. Connected my front USB port with the power connectors on the wrong pins --> a little "pop," a distinct smell of burning, an error message I didn't read in time and a hard shut-down with much panicking. That USB header still doesn't work - gives a "device not recognised" error whatever is connected to it.
3. Got an "NTLDR is missing" error on trying to boot. Decided my boot sector must be corrupted. Cue literally hours and hours of trying to first repair the boot sector, then get booted up with a portable Linux distro so I could back up and reinstall. Finally just took my hard-drive out, stuck it in my other PC, backed up and began the reinstall... only to find out that the problem all along was that I'd somehow reset my BIOS and it had defaulted to using my second (IDE) drive as the primary boot device...
4. Decided to flash my BIOS on a new build. Grabbed the first floppy to hand - an ancient, dust-covered relic with several peeling labels and a half-disconnected metal slider. Predictably the file wasn't in perfect condition and the flash failed halfway through leaving me with a dead mobo.
5. Trying to speed up a friend's PC whilst very, very drunk. In "streamlining" his start-up items and services I must have set his RPC to disabled because his PC wouldn't work again until I could get back to London with a RPC repair on a floppy. He wasn't happy and hasn't let me "help" with his PC since.
Soldato
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Done this a few times, not thinking to open the case and have a look at why it was restarting
I've done that but my heatsinks are always big enough to cool the CPU passively
Soldato
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I've done that but my heatsinks are always big enough to cool the CPU passively
i was walking about stock coolers for customers.....
I had three hard drives, two of them were broken, attempted to put two into a master slave array without prior knowledge of which drives were working and which weren't. Yeah. Lesson learnt, always test your gear before you start buggering around with it.
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Done a fair few over the years....
Helped a mate do his first build when we were 16 (and both massivly hung over) and had an hour long argument over how we get the cd drive into the case. Neither of us noticed it goes in from the front, not the inside....
Tried to get a board to overclock by changing the bios on it (old Foxconn NF4-ultra board that wouldnt do 201 fsb annoyingly), shame i put the sli bios on it and pooed my self for about an hour trying to get the original bios of my ntfs partition (only to remember the take the battery out of the board for 20 mins theory).
Urm nearly broke my velociraptor the day i got it by trying to fit it into the front hdd caddy in my sg03, the sata power and data connections are now a little loose as there wasnt really room for them with the floppy pannel bit on.
Took me an hour to notice the 8pin connector on my gtx 280 (i felt foolish)
Best though was using windows update (winMe were taking here) to try and get some better 3d drivers for my mad toshiba flat pannel (with 1meg of ram) to play lemans 24 hour propperly. That pretty much killed windows, lost the good drivers and annoyed my dad a lot....
Helped a mate do his first build when we were 16 (and both massivly hung over) and had an hour long argument over how we get the cd drive into the case. Neither of us noticed it goes in from the front, not the inside....
Tried to get a board to overclock by changing the bios on it (old Foxconn NF4-ultra board that wouldnt do 201 fsb annoyingly), shame i put the sli bios on it and pooed my self for about an hour trying to get the original bios of my ntfs partition (only to remember the take the battery out of the board for 20 mins theory).
Urm nearly broke my velociraptor the day i got it by trying to fit it into the front hdd caddy in my sg03, the sata power and data connections are now a little loose as there wasnt really room for them with the floppy pannel bit on.
Took me an hour to notice the 8pin connector on my gtx 280
(i felt foolish)Best though was using windows update (winMe were taking here) to try and get some better 3d drivers for my mad toshiba flat pannel (with 1meg of ram) to play lemans 24 hour propperly. That pretty much killed windows, lost the good drivers and annoyed my dad a lot....