Other Scariest thing thats happened with you and hardware?

Knocked over my entire rig whilst moving a desk. An almighty bang was heard. Luckily it was just the perspex window of my case breaking. Thank god I had a H50 - a Titan Fenrir would have ripped the guts out of my motherboard.

 

Great thread this

1 - Biggest annoyance one was installing a new mobo with all the care and attention required and then some (i have the table almost like an operating theatre as i imagine most people here do aswell ) only to stand the PC up afterwards and watch as a heatsink just dropped of a VRM for now apparant reason...................."Well f**k...." were my exact words.

2 - Scariest is hardware related but a little bigger than PC's. Ran over a cable driving one of those small, 30 foot, battery powered scissor lifts while building the new Bull Ring. A 415v armoured cable distributing power to the 110v units for power tools to use. It split and shorted but did not trip leaving me standing desperately keeping my body parts away from anything metal on the scissor lift shouting for some to turn off the crazy flapping sizzling cable which was getting closer.

3 - Scariest PC related moment was installing a Scythe Kazemaster fan controller for a mate. Didn't realise i'd not plugged in some cables and it lets out a horrible whine when you power up that is both terrifying to a PC builder and deafening. Absolutely shat my my pants. Funny as hell afterwards though

 

Mine was back when abit released The first legacy free mono for intel and amd CPUs think it was called itx or something both mobos for the two pcs i was building had dead parts, CPU , geforce cards, nics, mobos, mem only things that worked were the enermax psus. Overclockingstore (remember them?) replaced them in the end

 

had a few psu's blow up on me thats a scary moment

 

Saved for months to buy myself a new PC with a Geforce 2 MX400 AGP card.

Graphics card blew a cap when I booted the PC for the first time.

I had to call the fire brigade to come and rinse me off...

 

Not quite as scary as some peoples' offerings so far but I thought I'd share mine

Bought a replacement HSF for an old Compaq as the old one was getting very noisy. Removed the old one, went to fit the new one and realised that not only did the old HSF have a backplate that needed to be removed (which required taking the mobo out of the case) but it was glued onto the back of the mobo......

After some research I find myself sitting with the mobo upside-down on my lap, heating the glue with a hairdryer on maximum and pulling (quite hard) at the backplate with some pliers all the while thinking "what's the point in doing this - the mobo will never work again after all of this anyway..." but success! Backplate came off, all worked fine afterwards - god knows how!

 

I've got two significant memories;

1. My first PC build at the age of 15 or so. Was using expensive parts (2.8ghz p4, Asus P4C800 Deluxe etc). Everything in, and it wouldn't boot.

Sent the motherboard off to the people I bought it from (at a computer fair). They said there were no problems, and charged me about £30 for the privilege.

Reinstalled all parts, still not booting. Got very upset/annoyed/angry. Gave up hope.

Parents had some of their friends over, one of which was a amateur PC builder. He popped up to look at my PC, and noticed the problem. He pretty much said "you'll have killed the board - you haven't used any motherboard spacers - it'll have shorted itself out"

BIG PANIC.

Installed spacers, and that Asus mobo worked fine! In fact, I sold it off about a 18months ago, and my friend informs me it still works about 6 years on!

2. Some of you CPC-Forum migrants may remember this one - I was trying to make my newish HD4870 quieter and cooler (back when they were brand new and cost about £180?). I bought an Arctic Cooling heatsink, installed, and noticed the VRM temps were going far above what they should (like 140c+)

So I decided to buy some better ram/vrm-sinks to try and solve this problem. Whilst removing the old sinks, most came off fine (using the twist method). Tried twisting off one of the VRMs, only for the actual VRM to come off. I practically fainted!

After some faffing around, I posted on the CPC forums, and one bright bloke (I'm sad to not remember his name) PM'd me and offered to attempt to fix it - he said he worked with electronics, and had even worked on some F1 stuff for McLaren. So I sent it off to him - and, upon return, it worked for about 1 week. I was very grateful for this, however it then died (I imagine some of the weakened wires had just given up). :-(

Managed to swap the broken card for a 9600GT with £30 to the 'GT owner - so I wasn't completely screwed, but dam was I upset!

Since then, I seemed to have learnt from my mistakes - have the odd one here and there but thankfully nothing major.

Oh - however I did have a Hyper 580W Type R PSU blow up on me. Scary stuff! Thankfully, it didn't take any other parts with it. That PSU was worse than any generic PSU I have ever had! (however, I would never touch a generic PSU since becoming informed a few years ago)

 

Like this??



Also a Maxtor Hdd, been sat in my box to use one day as a dummy when building a new case

 

^Smoooth

 

Did some cable management in my case one day and didn't plug one cable properly in, so the PSU almost smoked my entire PC ; Motherboard, 3 x HDD and even my keyboard through the USB port got burned.

Some of the MOSFETs on the motherboard had cracked/chiped. The controller boards on the HDDs looked like they had caught fire. My Seagate HDD even leaked some purple fluid.
The PSU was a Corsair VX550 which I got replaced and uses today. I got two of the HDDs replaced even though it was because of the PSU (or me maybe... I still dunno).
Worse thing was that I lost all the data I had (my backup disk was the 3. HDD in the PC)

Well lesson learned to always have an external backup harddisk (sadly I can't afford an external HDD for backup at the moment, so I guess I haven't really learned anything)

 

Tried using Coollaboratory Liquid Pro on my (£340) GPUs when installing water block. Surface tension pulled most of it out of the syringe, formed into perfect balls, rolled off the GPUs and all over the PCB.

When I finally cleaned it all off I noticed the temps were poor, took the heatsink back off, and the Liquid Pro had turned into a lovely burnt bacon style crisp.

Never, ever use Coollaboratory Liquid Pro.

 

While I was sleeving my PCIE cables, I accidentally got the wires crossed (yes yes, one at a time!) and managed to blow a capacitor on my graphics card. Puff of smoke, horrible smell, entire PC refused to start up for about an hour so I thought I'd killed my PSU or more. Later on, with the dodgy cable replaced, it booted just fine, but crashed when the GPU was under any kind of stress.

On a slightly different note, at work I suspected my boss' PSU had gone as her office smelled pretty bad and we couldn't isolate exactly where the smell was coming from. After much head scratching, I thought it might only smoke under stress, so decided to run OCCT for a laugh. Sparks, smoke, giggles.

 

Damn. I just replaced a fan controller and forgot that I unplugged my water pump. CPU overheated so fast and the temps exceeded the operating temps of the PVC tubing. Luckily I was using compression fittings and noticed my tubing was developing some slack.

Always have extra tubing for replacement, crysis adverted. Yay compression fittings and hose clamps.

 

I had a disc explode... no kidding put it in a drive, it spun up and I heard a loud pop. Checked the computer nothing wrong. Sounded like a capacitor blowing up. Hit eject and pieces began to fall out of the drive, tons of them some super thin. Id guess a few thousand. never got them all out, never happened again even with that drive.

 

I spilt a 2 litre bottle of coke onto my pc when it was on! and the side panel was off

draining coolant with an air gun, I was so sure that a drop of water went into me Psu.

I Made a home made gpu water block, but little did i know my pump was only operating a 33% capacity and the coolant began to boil, about 5 seconds later it began to leak in my pc!

removing IDE Drives when in windows gotta love rma.

taking apart a PSU, and taking apart the 24pin cable

touching components you are so sure should melt

 

I think my very scariest moment was seeing actual flames come out the back of my brand new Apricot computer (yeah, 1980-something! )

But prolonged terror... Yeah that was the time when I decided I could build my own PC for the very first time. Think I shook the whole time. Then plugged it in, watched the cpu temps go stratospheric in the BIOS before hastily switching it off. Checked everything, switched it on, same result.. Rinse & repeat (why do we do the same thing over and over hoping something different will happen?? ) Noticed the psu was SO hot I couldn't touch it, but assumed it must be connected to the overheating processor.....

Anyway, I still have a soft spot for Maplin cos they were so great when I rolled in, slightly tearful, lugging my new system box.

Turned out that I'd taken too literally "don't put too much TIM on the cpu". I'd put it on and wiped it off, thinking that would fill up those microscopic gaps. Anyway, it was just as well because they rapidly spotted that the fan in the psu wasn't working so it was getting very hot indeed... It wasn't a cheap one either. Since they'd sold me it, they replaced it on the spot, fitted it for me and refitted the heatsink to the cpu.

I'm still a bit nervy around power supplies...

 

Were these the CPU coolers that would constantly rev up to Boeing 747 levels of sound every so often? I remember them well.

 

back when I was very young and didn't know any better I was sat at my Amiga 1200 working on something in AMOS Pro when I picked up a can of coke (remember those with the real ring pulls?) and missed my mouth completely. The ensuring spillage found its way through the keys of the Amiga 1200 and onto the system board. I can't recall all of the sweary words that I must have said whilst simulataneously removing all power with my big toe on the wall under the desk.

Anyway tried it three days later and hey presto it worked like a dream as indeed did its 68020 4MB expansion card and internal 3.5" 1GB HDD (probably my first and only mod!). Actually tried booting it up a few years ago when my parents were moving house and it still worked a dream! Its back int he attic now though.

More recently I had an unbranded PSU blow up on me when turning my machine on to check the cinema times. Spent the whole movie thinking "serves me right for not listening to bit-tech and custom pc forums". Ordered a branded modular 1kw a couple of days later after reading as many reviews as I could of different supplies. Luckily it hadn't taken any parts with it and they're still working on my now wifes machine to this day.

 

The exact same - so loud that I couldn't have a phone conversation in the same room as the PC - even then the 'cooler' (yeah right) was only keeping the CPU at 80-90 degrees with the CPU being throttled back!

 

i recently poured coffee over my g15 keyboard, whilst talking to customer on the phone, to which she got "SH*T oops sorry", luckily, they are made well, and no damage, after a clean out. but talk about to many screws must have had to remove 30 of the little buggers