Your biggest hardware muck up

[Midlife Crisis]

Hilarious

 

[Slamhamster]

It would be a few years ago, but getting a top of the line Athlon T-Bird and crushing the core when fitting the heat sink is the biggest mistake so far. Unfortunately I could only afford a Duron to replace it...

 

[Ragnahex]

Used my old case as a table. Had a cup of tea on the top and knocked it over.... There was a fan on the top and the entire inside of the pc got covered with a fine tea mist! Don't think you have ever seen someone move so quickly to turn the power off at psu in your life. After much mocking from the misses and pieces of pc drying out everywhere i lost nothing! a stick of ram didn't work but heated up greatly then second boot it worked fine. 6800 ultra died shortly after though so i fear it didn't like tea too much....

 

[DoneADougalOnSofa]

I left the clear film on the last CPU cooler i fitted, (though i swear i removed it) bit of head scratching with the temps...

Been there...

 

[SlugForAButt]

RIP celeron 300a & cyrix 333.

Was upgrading FROM my godawful cyrix 333 when I melted my Athlon.
Massive difference when I moved on. Cyrix didn't have a maths coprocessor if I remember right?

EDIT: I remember getting about 3 fps on Tachyon:The Fringe with my cyrix. Smooth as you like with the Athlon 750Mhz. Them were the days... AMD could build CPUs

 

[Levirginien]

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.

I love this one!

 

[DoneADougalOnSofa]

It is a good one...

 

[~Dockie]

Back when i had a Pentium D, in my curiosity i decided to remove the heatsink, but the heatpaste was so hard it pulled the CPU out too.

being as young/inexperienced as i was, i didn't know what to do, i panicked and just tried pushing it back in - heatsink still attached.

Think 1/3 of the pins got bent/broken off, expensive lesson learned.

 

[tbyeah]

I only have two minor muckups, not at all bad. Tried to ghetto mount a fan, it flew about the case until it hit a screw and blades broke off. Very lucky it didn't break something expensive . Also mounted a CPU cooler the wrong way but that made pretty much no difference.

 

[lucifer-mnm]

Hmm lets see....

First PC build - screwed motherboard directly to the case - no standoffs - luckily I noticed before turning it on.

Did the old psu voltage switch thing to see what would happen to an old psu - boom!

I fried an old Athlon 1Ghz cpu by running it with no heatsink - the cpu lasted seconds.

While fitting a rather tight heatsink on an old athlon system I had to use a screwdriver to force a clip down and slipped leaving a large scratch across the surface of the board killing it.

On a new build of my own I managed to plug the front usb ports into the firewire connector on the board - cue lots of smoke and a set of dead usb ports.

I've had a PSU spontaneously combust - smoke and flames coming out of the back while the computer continued to run.

 

[CrixxzeH]

Prior to OcUK when I was a hardware noob, screwed my motherboard directly onto my case without standoffs. It still booted haha

thats insane!

hold my hands up, I did that with my first gaming pc build.

 

[Akagi]

On a new build of my own I managed to plug the front usb ports into the firewire connector on the board - cue lots of smoke and a set of dead usb ports.

I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE! YAYY! *bounces up and down*

Unfortunately, in my case it was a chip on the motherboard that caught fire. The USB ports were fine.

 

[Spud21]

Only managed to break one thing in my time building computers and that was my old Gigabyte mobo, we having crashing issues and the computer would just stop with no output from the graphics card, so i thought my GTX680 had died, so ordered a pair of Radeon 9750's, fitted them still same issue, tested the graphics card's in a spare rig and they worked fine tested everything else and only got the issue with that motherboard, so promptly bought a new gigabyte mobo.

Installed everything and all was well, then after a few days the same problem appeared, at this point i was getting annoyed so thought i'd strip the rig down and have a damn good look, comes to taking the graphics card out and forgot to flick the PCI-E lever and proceeded to remove not only the graphics card but the pci slot as well, so after only a few days i'd buggered my nice new mobo

Then found out it was the psu causing the issues so replaced that and my original ASUS board that i replaced is still going strong

 

[phatboy]

could hear a fan slightly catching a cable in pc, took side off....put hand in....accidently touch solder point on Nvidia PhysX card PCB with my wedding ring = Blue arcing, pop and no more PhysX card

Rest of the PC survived though. RESULT!

 

[maklabouhlel]

Connected both molex and sata power to the same hard drive when both options were present. It cooked.

 

[maklabouhlel]

Forgot to mount the cooler an an Athlon XP chip. It smoked.

 

[Fire_fly]

On the first PC I ever helped build with a friend we could not get it to turn on, cue an evening of head scratching. Turned out we had forgot to attach the 4 pin CPU power connector. We realised the next day plugged it in and it still would not switch on, 2 more minutes of head scratching, we hadn't flicked the little switch on the back of the PSU.

Had what I though was a faulty motherboard, the computer took 5+ minuets to shut down. Sent the board back to the retailer, they confirmed that it was faulty and sent it back to Gigabyte who replaced it. Got the replacement but was still having the same issue. Turns out that it was caused by my USB wireless stick, I don't know what was wrong with motherboard though .

Also had a fan controller that caught fire.