Your biggest hardware muck up

Associate
Joined
1 Aug 2009
Posts
1,625
I had a Corsair power supply blow on me [nothing else died]. After throwing it out it I found the receipt and it still had a weeks guarantee on it DOH!.
Not too expensive for me lets hear of you build/spill/overclocking disasters.
 
Associate
Joined
27 Jun 2008
Posts
335
I managed to kill two perfectly working CPUs (2600k and 2700k) in one evening after trying them on a dodgy motherboard bought from the bay...:o
Luckily, Intel was kind enough to replace both CPUs.:D:D:D
 
Soldato
Joined
22 Aug 2010
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4,870
Prior to OcUK when I was a hardware noob, screwed my motherboard directly onto my case without standoffs. It still booted haha
 
Soldato
Joined
16 Nov 2003
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5,445
Prior to OcUK when I was a hardware noob, screwed my motherboard directly onto my case without standoffs. It still booted haha

I did a version of this. The only difference was I didn't remove some of the standoffs so the motherboard was shorting at various points... :o:p

I also killed an Athlon 1900 XP by powering it up with no heatsink on it. It died incredibly quickly right there in front of me with a fizz and a puff of smoke. Then got sent two replacements! :D:cool: #Winning
 
Caporegime
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29 Jul 2011
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In acme's chair.
When I built my first Sandybridge PC which was a massive upgrade over my previous Athlon 6000+ PC, I plugged the front USB cable into the Firewire header because I wasn't paying attention and the colour & pinout were the same. I turned it on and the motherboard caught fire near the header. :(

I still used that motherboard for 2 years, I de-activated Firewire in the BIOS, cleaned the burn mark with something or other, and put a blanking cap over the header. Sold it for £30 still. :p

Another thing I did once was take the fans off of my 240MM radiator which was in the top of my case, which of course, meant taking out all the screws which were holding the radiator in. I then continued what I was doing, testing the temperatures with a passive radiator, and then I felt my heart sink through the floor as I suddenly realised that the only thing holding it in was the warm rubber washers sticking it to the roof of the case. I managed to stick a screw or two in before it fell off though! :eek: :D
 
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Soldato
Joined
18 Nov 2007
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7,925
Location
Deepest Darkest Essex!!
When I first got my 1ghz socket A chip and motherboard, I mounted the cooler on the wrong way round. Killed it over the course of a few days :(

I did something similar. :( The salesperson in the computer fair at the time, sold me a copper spacer, which apparently was reccommended by AMD to put between the the Athlon XP & the cooler. Needless to say it didn't work & the chip was roasted to a crisp (no thermal protection on those babies back then) Best part of £100 down the drain. :mad:
 
Soldato
Joined
21 Apr 2011
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3,119
On an old Opus 286 SX8 - I was only about 9 years old and just getting into doing stuff inside systems. Saw the voltage switch on the PSU and switched it down to 110v option.

Whilst the PC was on....
 
Man of Honour
Joined
12 Jul 2005
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20,484
Location
Aberlour, NE Scotland
Had a Hiper Type R 580w psu blow up (literally, smoke and flames, change of undies!!) and took out a 2 week old DFI socket 939 motherboard. So much for reviews back then saying it was a very good psu!!

Killed a E8500 when they first launched by giving it too much voltage trying to hit 4.5Ghz. Was used to pushing 1.45-1.5v through the previous 65nm cpu's. Unfortunately 45nm cpu's don't like that much.
 
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