Your biggest hardware muck up

Got drunk and tried to set up a second system out of spare parts so a buddy could deathmatch me. Ended up plugging a Slot 1 Pentium 2 into an AMD Slot A board which blew the board with a bang.

For reference AMD used Intel's socket but orientated it backwards so the heat sink would foul the I/O ports if the CPU/board was mismatched, if you forgot the heat sink because drunk though you could still plug the wrong type CPU into the wrong type board.
 
ubersonic said:
Got drunk and tried to set up a second system out of spare parts so a buddy could deathmatch me. Ended up plugging a Slot 1 Pentium 2 into an AMD Slot A board which blew the board with a bang.

For reference AMD used Intel's socket but orientated it backwards so the heat sink would foul the I/O ports if the CPU/board was mismatched, if you forgot the heat sink because drunk though you could still plug the wrong type CPU into the wrong type board.
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Love this one. :D
 
Swarfega said:
Couldnt get a new PC I was building to do anything. After removing and reseating of stuff I forgot the heatsink/fan on the CPU. That Athlon CPU started smoking and left a purple burn mark. It was dead. Brand new never used CPU fried.
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+1 for doing this. Athlon chips died very quickly like that!
 
Bought a brand new AMD slot A Athlon (750Mhz I think) as part of a new build. My Rage Fury Maxx GPU turned out to be faulty and so I left the build in pieces while I drove to Bradford to swap it.
I got back home a couple of hours later to find my Mother had turned the gas fire on while my Athlon was sat on top of it. Maybe you all remember the big plastic box that the slot A CPU lived in? Well, it sure wasn't going to fit any PC after that.
Lesson learned.
 
This is not mine, but a friend of mine did it.

They were re-building a newer PC using the CPU out of a slightly older machine and one of the newer parts was a beefier cooler. They assembled the new rig and it didn't boot so then has to dismantle it. However, the cooler wouldn't come off and after referring to the thermal paste packaging, they found out they'd used "Permanent Thermal Adhesive".

They got it off in the end and it turned out the board was dead. Always read the instructions :D
 
Spent £150 on a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional Series Sound Card, for a new build. About a year later I realised speakers were plugged into the onboard socket. :confused:
 
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Lemin said:
Spent £150 on a Fatality sound card for a new build. About a year later I realised speakers were plugged into the onboard socket. :confused:
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:D

Is the muck up spending £150 on a Fatal1ty branded sound card, or accidentally neglecting to use it? :p
 
knowing absolutely nothing about computer hardware at the time, i was fooled into buying an nvidia fx5200 because of the shiny box. :o
 
Went to a mates house for a small LAN party in Ireland

My mate wrapped his motherboard up in bubble wrap, not surprisingly it didn't work when he got there.

I had a 3 pin fan extender connected to the motherboard but the fan wasn't connected so the pins shorted on the case.

Turned on the PC and it started smoking something lethal, thought the thing was on fire. So I'm sat there bricking it and begin shutting it down in the normal way.. Start, Shutdown in Windows... while it's still smoking. Before my mate shouts across the room "Pull the bloody plug out"

I also remember building my brother a PC many years ago and some how managing to knock off a part of the GPU PCB, think it was a capacitor. **** myself thinking i'd just wasted my fathers money (was building it for his birthday) but plugged it in anyway and it worked fine for a number of years, phew.
 
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LOL @ some of these! Mine isn't quite as funny... :)

Once I tried my hand at peltier cooling. Looked OK, so I went to get a drink. When I came back the peltier had got too hot and the plates had fallen off, proceeding to destroy the CPU, motherboard, and anything else in its path! :( Sad times.
 
I can't say I've killed anything but made a few complete noob errors on builds, twice now as recently as x79 and z97 I've completed the build only to be greeted with no post, some sweating and head scratching later I realise I didn't put any ram in :eek:
 
Ive only ever had a new psu go pop when it was first turned on. Ram in the wrong slots is one ive done on every build ive put together. Also i always forget to reenable sli after driver updates. Midway through a game ill notice fps are a bit on the lowside then ill start wondering, did i enable sli in the nvcp?
 
Bought a Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H off ebay.
Chucked my 2500K into it, it boot-looped so I turned it off, and pressed the button to try the backup BIOS. Success. Into the BIOS. Did what I had to do, save and exit, restart, bootloop.

So, with the power still on, I mashed the BIOS switch on the mobo several times.
I now have two dead BIOS chips. Luckily the CPU was fine...
£75 down the pan in about ten minutes. :mad:
 
pgi947 said:
I can't say I've killed anything but made a few complete noob errors on builds, twice now as recently as x79 and z97 I've completed the build only to be greeted with no post, some sweating and head scratching later I realise I didn't put any ram in :eek:
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Speaking of complete noob errors. I recently completely stripped, modded and rebuilt the rig in my sig. When I finally put it all back together and filled it with water - I hit the on button and nothing happened - barring a small click from the PSU. I spent ages checking all the connections, testing RAM one stick at a time, checking motherboard standoffs etc and still nothing. It wasn't until I was about to swap the PSU out that I realised I had plugged one of the modular connectors in upside down! DOH :p
 
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