Hot or not?

Liquiduk

Liquiduk

Liquiduk

Associate
Joined
19 Nov 2010
Posts
1,776
Location
London
In light of me being a complete pillock and mounting an AIO watercooler on to my CPU not connecting it properly and causing my processor to reach 110c before a complete system failure it got me thinking... What's the stupidest thing you've done whilst building a PC?
 
When I was younger and didn't know much, my folks bought me a Voodoo 2 for my birthday. When I went to put it in, there was this big green thing in the way so without much thought I pulled it off so the card would fit. Turns out it was the heatsink for the CPU.
 
firing up a new build and hearing the sound of the fan cable being ingested into the cpu cooler fan? errrrrrrr
i could fill a encyclopaedia just with the failures ive achieved this year so far and were only at the end of January lol
 
touch wood my worst one so far is "only" forgetting to remove the plastic sticker on the heatsink cooler plate...thankfully that was quickly remedied
i haven't yet broken any components *phew*
 
At one time I didn't have much space for building, so it had to be on the floor. Laid out an anti-static mat I'd borrowed from work, parts all neatly laid out ready to go. Organised for once...

Wife opens door. Bottom of door snags the cpu, drags it off the mat onto the carpet while bending ALL the pins 90 degrees.....
 
Tried to de-lid a brand new 3770k with a razor blade back when that was all the rage.

Hours later I successfully removed the IHS I noticed a couple of scratches on the PCB. :(

I have a USB microscope, so I took a look. It was as if I had gone through the traces with a Chainsaw.

Oddly enough I did manage to boot into windows with it after a couple of goes but most of the time I would just get a blank screen.

So, it ended up in the bin the same day an expensive lesson learned lol.
 
RavenLunatic said:
It was as if I had gone through the traces with a Chainsaw.
Click to expand...

Fortunately the only time I've done something like that is with an old LGA775 motherboard I pulled out of storage a at some point around the time of the COVID lockdowns to have a play with - screwdriver slipped while trying to mount the heatsink and took out a bunch of traces like I'd gone at it with a chainsaw despite a fairly glancing blow. I'm usually much more careful.
 
I killed a board once by opening the case to fiddle about with something then seeing this blue spark when I accidentally touched something on the board. Suffice to say it didn't work after that. I think I still had the power connected, you'd never seen me move back so fast.

This was way back in the 1998 era. Never done it again and I live to tell the tale.
 
Attempted to swap out an SSD from one broken company laptop to a new one that I was sent. I didn't want to loose all my work docs that were stored on the SSD. In no way should I have been opening the company laptop to do this.

The old laptop had a metal shroud around its SSD. The new laptop didn't, for some stupid reason I tried to fit the shroud over the SSD in the new laptop. A few crackles and sparks came from the motherboard whilst I bridged some connections, no surprise the new laptop wouldn't turn on! I had to call the IT department and say the new laptop turned up not working. Another laptop was sent out to resolve the issue! oops!

On the bright side, it didn't cost me a penny and I had two days off work whilst waiting for the replacement laptops!
 
Last edited:
I bought an 8-pack 5.1GHz speed binned & de-lidded i7-7700K on release, think it was close to a grand but it was 2017 and old OCUK shop so can't see the order now. It was obsolete so quickly after I got it seeing as it is the last 4 core 8 thread i7.

It was relegated to "home server" shortly after.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom