Your build horror stories....

FarleyUK

FarleyUK

FarleyUK

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Joined
24 Feb 2003
Posts
162
So, I got my £2000 worth of kit last week, and started building the PC. Spent 2 nights doing in, and around 4am on Saturday, I was ready to rock.

Checked all connections.

Double checked all connections.

Hit the power button..... nothing. So, I changed the header around, and tried again. It worked, but all fans stayed on max speed, and the BIOS didn't post or anything. So, there I am, tired, ****** off and stressed, and with 2k wasted.

I don't know what to try, so reset BIOS jumpers, remove the battery and wait. Try again and IT'S ALIVE!!! however, it happened again, but the BIOS update seems to have sorted it.

God, I hate it when the PC doesn't work once you've built it all and installed it in the case....!!!

So come on then - what's YOUR worst horror story about your PC builds?
 
Touch wood I've never had any. Basic rule of thumb is that as long as the CPU and HSF are installed correctly, then everything should be fine. If you leave the memory out, it will tell you. If your HDDs aren't connected, then you won't get far. Even with the CPU not connected, some motherboards will sound an alarm. Even you have deduced the problem.

Apart from people fixing the mobo to the motherboard tray without risers. These are the people who don't do their research first.
 
Well there was my very first home build, an amd 3000+ 939 pc, which for the first day sat stuck in the nf4 raid controller set up. I wasnt ammused as i had one hdd in it so i was going no where till i unplugged EVERYTHING and went back to it the next day (there was a day of hl2 lost).

Then theres the day this pc had been upgraded to an opteron 148 on (the better at overclocking) an8-sli and the south bridge went on it (completaly might i add taking all on board things like the nic...). Of course the troubles dont stop here, OCUK do we the DFI RDX200 (a class board) for £40. So im dismanteling my pc and discover iv managed to effectivly glue my heatsink to the opty making it really really hard to remove then reattach. Long story short i bent half the pins on the proc as the heasink rolled onto it.

Finally, getting my E8200 system (the southbridge died on the rdx too) it took me an hour to get the thing to boot from cd! (yeah i didnt see the option to cycle round to the named dvd drive)

Out do that? (without pooring water into your psu...)
 
had the exact same problem when I built my Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe system.....was on the phone to Asus USA as UK Asus was closed by then...while waiting did what u did and all was ok after.....talk about a cold sweat :Þ
 
Yeah, I am not ashamed to say I nearly **** my pants.

The mention of risers made me wonder - I am pretty certain my Antec P182 had Risers built in.... if not, it wouldn't boot would it, as it would short the mobo?
 
Think my worst moment was when I put together my previous system, in a Lian-Li V2000+B. At the time (last summer I believe) this system was top top notch, cost me £2500 for all the parts I think! Anyway, while fitting one of the parts (can't remember which now) I cut myself on a bit of the inners of the case and blood started to drip inside my brand new £200 case!! Safe to say I was terrified I was going to get it on one of the components and do some serious damage to it!

That's pretty much my only horror story of builds, other ones I have done have gone smoothly. Key to it is to take your time and try not to do it all in one day, tend to miss something or connect things wrong if you do that.
 
Its easy to do a build in a day, a few hours in fact.

My re-build over the weekend was awful, faulty mobo, 2Gb ram died, suspected faulty hdd turned out to be a faulty sata cable.
I was about ready to throw the whole thing out the window at one point.
 
I got a duff mobo during my first build. Now I was in doubt from the start whether I could build one and that really didn't help. Took it down the shop where I got it and got a replacement the next day though and no problems since then.

Now second time I build a PC (this time for a friend), I forgot to switch the voltage to 220 instead of 130 on the back of the PSU and I heard this zip sound when powered it on. Panicking at this point thinking I just burned £1000 worth of components. Decided to go to my house to pick up my PC so could test parts individually (20 minute walk one way and the way back had to carry it). All while I forgot to check something as basic as a fuse inside the black power cord :p "touches wood" He hasn't had any problems for over 3 and a half years now (apart from a graphics card going on him but that got RMAed with OCUK in about 3 days).

My current system has been trouble free for the first 2 and a half years, but since then it's been through one PSU, 1 (possibly 2) motherboards, 3 graphics cards and my RAM seems to be misbehaving now. Seriously getting fed up with this, but this is a socket A set up still and considering its age I'm surprised it's still going.
 
I used the harddrive screws to pin down the motherboard (which sends the wrong voltages through it), ended up frying 4 3870X2's, 2 X38-DS4's, a 900Watt Tagan BZ Power supply & OCZ memory all in the space of four months untill they finally told me to just send the whole damn lot in, overclockers kindly replaced it all for me for £50. I officially love the tech. support. They are no. 1 on my christmas card list.
 
i've never heard that using the wrong mobo screws can damage everything? can say i've always used the correct supplied ones but it's strange to think that. :confused:just shows how little i know. :p
 
FarleyUK said:
So, I got my £2000 worth of kit last week, and started building the PC. Spent 2 nights doing in, and around 4am on Saturday, I was ready to rock.

Checked all connections.

Double checked all connections.

Hit the power button..... nothing. So, I changed the header around, and tried again. It worked, but all fans stayed on max speed, and the BIOS didn't post or anything. So, there I am, tired, ****** off and stressed, and with 2k wasted.

I don't know what to try, so reset BIOS jumpers, remove the battery and wait. Try again and IT'S ALIVE!!! however, it happened again, but the BIOS update seems to have sorted it.

God, I hate it when the PC doesn't work once you've built it all and installed it in the case....!!!

So come on then - what's YOUR worst horror story about your PC builds?
Click to expand...

3 faulty motherboards in a row, not nice :(

1. no screen output
2. no screen output
3. broken on board LAN

Took around a month to get each one replaced as well :(
 
Always have worse trouble when building for other people. Had a dead Taigan PSU, that pretended to be alive (mobo light on, that was all), that gave me a few worries until I shoved some old junker PSU into it and it started fine.

Another build for a mate came with a broken 7800GT and a dodgy sata cable. Told him, crappin myself (was a £350+ card at the time), and he says, "oh never worry, most of them are broke, I'll get it replaced", took me days to recover my composure. He also replaced the SATA lead with a WD proprietry one that was totally useless (it had the power and data connector moulded into one plug at the drive end, and only a data plug at the other......yeah, I know, WTF?)

My own most recent build involved getting the whole thing in the box, cuts, bruises and slashes and all.......then realising that.......

A.My TT was blowing forwards (so much for aligning it as in the "manual").
B. There was no chance of plugging in either the earth-tag for the back panel, OR the LCD poster, while the board was in situ cos of the TT. Had to strip the lot and start over.grrrrrrrrrrr
Best bit was, when I had it all back in, I realised I hadn't connected the CPU power. No prob, I though, since I'd managed to plug it in last time with the tower in place. Yes, that was before my hands had swolen up cos it was the middle of the night (and they'd been attacked repeatedly by a TT and the Antec900). Took an hour to fiddle it back into place.

BTW, I've built in a case that didn't use risers before.
 
when i fitted my water kit temps shot up to 60 c + after a few days then i noticed the apogee was bending the mobo :eek:

so i fitted a back plate but it wouldn't boot turned out my old evga 680i was shorting out on the plate

this was a nightmare as i took me ages to figure it out and i drained and refilled my watercooling about 10 times and had motherboard in and out about the same

:(
 
Thought of another (then again it was purely my foolishness)

ehm, i had my formentioned "lovable" foxconn nf4 board (back when they made the most bog average things you could shake a stick at) and in my quest to make it overclock at all i decided to flash the bios,....
shame it was for the sli version of the board! it took me 3 hours of pratting about with ntfs dos floppys to try and get my original bios back of my xp hdd for me to remember the words of my father, "take the battery out". yeah best to stay with i felt like a prune when the original bios came back "magially"

Oooo also my "beloved" x800gto2 (the one you could flash to turn into the x850 and was so cool to brag that it cost like £100) that overheated to 95 degrees and gave massive artifacts on the stressful game that is civ4. needless to say i got a tidy £130 return on the bay
 
my only horror story occurred a few months ago. i can only guess as to what happened as i was out at the time but judging from the end result i have a good idea. i hadn't loosened the cap on my water cooling reservoir for a while and it seems the pressure built up to a point that it loosened the top of my cpu's water block. feser one started to flow out and onto my gtx the feser one somehow got in between the heatsink and the GPU. at this point a fair amount of feser one must have left my loop and a big air bubble formed in the cpu water block. (i know that much because it was there when i got back in) the air bubble stopped the flow and kept what little feser one was left in the water block which proceeded to pretty much boil. i got back in to find artifacts all over my monitor and the temp readings were over 100c. of course i immediately turned the pc off and touched the water block (mistake) thing was literally burning hot. miraculously my processor survived but my 8800 gtx was fried. the thing just refused to boot.

o and I've had a hard drive fail on me before that's a real pain in the ass as well.
 
A tale of BIOS woe (with a happy-ish ending).

GF's bro buys her a Rad 9800pro for her birthday.
GF dislikes card as it will not play fullscreen video for her, prefering instead to turn black and lock the machine stone dead. I offer to sort it out, saying something about ATi's drivers being a bit broke/not broke on alternate releases (which according to many an ATi owning friend, they were at the time). No, she's hates it, it has to go. So she offers it to me for a good £50 less than fleabay going rate, in the full knowledge that I need pixel shader support for a certain rally game that's been burning a hole in my hard drive.

It took an hour and half a dozen driver versions to get the video working.

Which is when I found out how hideous the SVideo output was.
So I tried Linux, mumbling something about it's TV-out always looking much nicer.
Which is when I found out what ATi's Linux drivers were like (think "binary pipe bomb" ).
I did get the TV out on though, and it was just as vile as in windows.
The colour balance was foul and there was dot crawl so bad you'd have had the cover off a ZXspectrum for doing it.
"must be NTSC"
Card insisted it was PAL, and the right sub-variant too.

Bugger that.

Downloaded ATi BIOS blowing utility, and a bios matching every criteria with my card, and with the PAL setting engaged.
Saved current bios to file.
rebooted
Flashed
rebooted
Filled my trunks!!!!!!!!!!!

A psychadelic post screen is never good, even less so when the OS boots a little bit, also psychadelic, then fills IT'S trunks, and reboots.

Hadn't paid GF yet.

But, you don't grow up with Scotty and The Doctor (T.Baker natch) without knowing how to get out of deep doo doo.
I put my trusty MX440 back in and repeatedly booted the ATI flash tool, learning the key sequence for flashing (thankfully it refused to brick the nvidia, because obviously I had to learn RIGHT through to the end). Then reboot, return original BIOS using blind typing. reboot while offering up a silent prayer to the firmware gods.

Phew!

Card still stank. But it worked.
Eventually hacked existing bios without flashing and forced the PAL setting. It still stank, but a little less.
However, it was fabulous for games.
And that's why I split into 2 machines.
A winbox with the ATi for games and music work.
And a Linux box with an nvidia for everything else.

Been that way ever since, apart from there being a minimum of a 5 year ban on ATi cards in my boxen.
 
well, the worst thing i have had since i started building was that a screw wouldnt go into a 120mm fan. thats about it lol.:p

but!, im just about to build again so lets hope it all goes well!:rolleyes:
 
I have an ancient Asus motherboard in the garage somewhere with a splash of blood from my finger on the chipset due to a sharp edge case. The board still worked for years though :)

It's much easier now than it used to be. Anyone remember when a successful hardware build was followed by several days of assigning IRQ's and DMA addresses so that your SCSI card didn't blat your ethernet card that was busy preventing your sound card from starting?
 
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