Biggest mistake I've made in a while. Come laugh.

D

Damn Dirty Ape

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 21, 2005
Messages
1,840
So, bought a Raven RVZ01 mini-itx case to swap my wife's system into and get it out of the huge case that is a pain to move around. Swapped over the memory, video card, SSD. Put in the new Asus Impact board in, power supply and flat cable set, the slimline optical drive. Since for now I'm using the standard intel fan assembly I waited until the last part since I didn't need to worry about a backplate. All happy about how easily and nice looking I had the system.

So...I pulled the processor out of her asus motherboard and carefully sat it down on the socket...hmm says self, 'seems like it's not quite the right shape'.

Yeah an Intel 3770K won't fit into a Z87 1150 motherboard very well. I was just at MC yesterday picking up the new motherboard.

It never even crossed my mind the one in hers wasn't a z87 since system already is.

just wow. I'm over it and wanted to share and tell others of the biggest mistake I've made in quite a while.
 
Anyone in this game any length of time has been there. Laugh and learn.
 
At least you didn't destroy a thousand dollar Opteron in your Server+ class on Day 1 by not checking the bottom, mistaking the connectors for being ball instead of pins and breaking half of them. Only then to be followed up by your partner doing the same thing completely taking a lab server out of rotation in 5 minutes and looking like a complete n00b for not checking. lol
 
Liger88 said:
At least you didn't destroy a thousand dollar Opteron in your Server+ class on Day 1 by not checking the bottom, mistaking the connectors for being ball instead of pins and breaking half of them. Only then to be followed up by your partner doing the same thing completely taking a lab server out of rotation in 5 minutes and looking like a complete n00b for not checking. lol
Click to expand...

wow.
 
my worst mistake was building a friend's rig a while back.

Back in the days of 486, pentium etc. no thermal compound was needed, even just heatsinks were enough without fans. Also at that time was no thermal protection on cpu's.

My friend brought a athlon thunderbird chip, I put the system together without using any compound. Turned it on and it beeped showing it was posting however the screen never came on. Power cycled it but was no beep the 2nd time. Took the cpu out and was fried, basically it fried within a few seconds.

He couldnt exchange it so he ended up buying a cheaper replacement, a duron, and this time we got compound and the 2nd system worked.
 
Or buy a Rampage IV Black Edition mb thinking GSkill 64 gb of ares memory would work lol not. Had to buy another kit errr.
 
I killed a K7S5A motherboard and cpu back in the day. I was swapping the perfectly good heatsink out for a slightly better one and the screwdriver slipped. It was really easy to do back in the socket A days. I did notice that a small resistor had been knocked off the board, but I thought, "well, how important can it be?" Eventually with some more wrestling I got the heatsink in place and turned it on. Pop.
If I had stopped and just bought a new board it would have saved the cpu.
 
chrcoluk said:
my worst mistake was building a friend's rig a while back.

Back in the days of 486, pentium etc. no thermal compound was needed, even just heatsinks were enough without fans. Also at that time was no thermal protection on cpu's.

My friend brought a athlon thunderbird chip, I put the system together without using any compound. Turned it on and it beeped showing it was posting however the screen never came on. Power cycled it but was no beep the 2nd time. Took the cpu out and was fried, basically it fried within a few seconds.

He couldnt exchange it so he ended up buying a cheaper replacement, a duron, and this time we got compound and the 2nd system worked.
Click to expand...

ouch
 
pgaster said:
I killed a K7S5A motherboard and cpu back in the day. I was swapping the perfectly good heatsink out for a slightly better one and the screwdriver slipped. It was really easy to do back in the socket A days. I did notice that a small resistor had been knocked off the board, but I thought, "well, how important can it be?" Eventually with some more wrestling I got the heatsink in place and turned it on. Pop.
If I had stopped and just bought a new board it would have saved the cpu.
Click to expand...

I have always worried about the screwdriver slipping and killing something.
 
I remember ordering a motherboard to go with my dual Xeon W5580s back a few years ago. I ordered the Supermicro X8DAH +-F and was looking forward to it. I received it, unboxed it and was in the process of installing it when it just seemed not to fit. I looked closer, and then realized that it was a proprietary 13.68x13 size, instead of the standard 12x13 E-ATX. A small detail to be sure, but I felt like dumbass of the year after that one. I definitely pay much closer attention to board size when ordering a motherboard today...;)
 
Bad luck op.

I've had many silly things happen (not just by my own hand) as I owned a manufacturing company for a while, but some you get caught unawares.
A friends IDE hard drive died, tested it externally, it was dead. Everything else looked fine.
We got a replacement drive and thought that died, but the motherboard did.
Plugged in a new motherboard and it still didnt work so changed the IDE cable.
All worked fine.

We cut that cable up.
It was possible that either the hard drive or motherboard dying damaged the other and then we damaged the IDE cable as well, so we dont know the original cause.
Or the IDE cable killed everything.
There was no point taking further risk finding out.

The most expensive was at the release of 386 Processors, we had 2 of the very first motherboards come in from Taiwan for evaluation.
Plugged in our standard 8 bit ISA I/O card (LPT/Serial) and the motherboard died.
We needed to confirm whether there was a serious incompatibility as good parts at decent prices were hard to come by, so plugged a second I/O card into the second motherboard.
Killed that board too!
That was over £2000 of motherboards killed in seconds by basic electronic incompatibility.
It took almost a year to get replacements back from Taiwan, they were worth a fraction of the original cost by then.

When we had components that worked, they would change the design with the next shipment usually without a positive experience. It was hard work getting decent standards.
The early days, we have it easy now!!
 
While trying to attach one of those old style clip heatsinks on a cpu socket, screwdriver slipped and removed few surface mount doodads from an abit motherboard ...
 
I wonder if I had someone's mistake shipped to me today, z87 turned up pre opened, creased manual, board looks ok on examination although the sticker is loose over the cpu socket clearly been put back on after taken off, I told amazon to send me something brand new this time, didnt want to take chance.
 
I remember my first time installing a CPU....didn't go that bad. :D
 
Oh god my first time, must have been about 10 years ago now, let just say the socket came off the board.
 
I butter-fingered a CPU in my 1155 and bent a couple of pins. Fortunately, my wife and small and nimble fingers, and she was able to help me straighten the suckers out. Board's still working and is in the system in sig.
 
Damn Dirty Ape said:
I have always worried about the screwdriver slipping and killing something.
Click to expand...

Sometime last year I was removing the hyper 212+ from my board to remove the 2500k. Didnt leave myself much room to work with, got frustrated and lost focus only to smack a capacitor free. Had to buy a replacement (using in sig now).

Sadly this was all so i could use the 2500k to flash a friend's bios, and nothing else.
 
jbltecnicspro said:
I butter-fingered a CPU in my 1155 and bent a couple of pins. Fortunately, my wife and small and nimble fingers, and she was able to help me straighten the suckers out. Board's still working and is in the system in sig.
Click to expand...

I bent 2 pins a looong time back and managed to straighten them with a pin and magnifying glass. I know I was more careful after that first new socket type encounter.
 
xorbe said:
While trying to attach one of those old style clip heatsinks on a cpu socket, screwdriver slipped and removed few surface mount doodads from an abit motherboard ...
Click to expand...

I bet they were some of the necessary ones, right :)
 
Got the correct chip today (return trip to MC) and the silverstone rv01 is running nicely waiting for my wife to come home.
 
Mine was a new Socket 939 AMD 64 3200+, motherboard and ram. I had everything put together but just had a little bit of a hard time putting the video card in.

Turns out AGP cards don't fit PCI-E slots. I felt like a complete idiot on that one.
 
Many years ago, I got a new motherboard and CPU. Removed the old MB & CPU and found the new one didn't quite fit. Turns out there was this new standard called "ATX" so I had to buy a new case.
 
I had just brought home a brand new Sabertooth Z77 motherboard for a build... pulled off the plastic cap to make sure all of the pins were in good shape, and went to put it back on until I got around to building the machine... I somehow managed to mess up putting the plastic cover back on and bent a few pins.

Thankfully with a bit of patience and a needle I was able to fix them, but damn was that nerve-racking.

Oh, and one more... I had just put together a build for someone which wouldn't turn on, I got increasingly nervous as I flipped the switch on the PSU on and off to see if it would come on. Turns out since I didn't look at it I had the switch in the wrong position, and I was flipping it on and then back to off before hitting the power button :p
 
Thermite Paste said:
Oh, and one more... I had just put together a build for someone which wouldn't turn on, I got increasingly nervous as I flipped the switch on the PSU on and off to see if it would come on. Turns out since I didn't look at it I had the switch in the wrong position, and I was flipping it on and then back to off before hitting the power button :p
Click to expand...

Done that too many times already lol.
 
lmao, good stuff... it happens to everyone. I've made some really stupid and expensive mistakes that involve things breaking... we'll leave those unmentioned for now:D
 
Twas 93 or 94 iirc and I was building my first entirely self-purchased system (amd 486 33). Had a lot of experience with using and assembling computers by this point, but they had always been for someone else. In my effort to be extremely meticulous (dot ever i, cross every t - since this was my personal system of course), I used the pink foam from the motherboard box to insulate the board from the standoff screws and sheet panels inside the case just in case there was a short somewhere (tolerances where not as exact then). I figured it was foam rubber, it should be fine. I didn't take into consideration the heat, which was nothing compared to CPUs/boards today, but still enough to smoke, melt/expand/bubble the rubber goo into the inlets of the power supply. Lots of electrical fire and smoke, but system was ultimately salvageable (replaced the case and power supply with an old tower Gateway 2000 case (during their cow phase)).

Sometime later in college I superglue'd that same 486 heatsink to a Geforce 256 when the original fan burned out. Worked great for at least another year.

I've been much smarter in builds since ;)
 
LOCO LAPTOP said:
Mine was a new Socket 939 AMD 64 3200+, motherboard and ram. I had everything put together but just had a little bit of a hard time putting the video card in.

Turns out AGP cards don't fit PCI-E slots. I felt like a complete idiot on that one.
Click to expand...

Haha.. turns out AGP cards also didn't like being shorted when seated incorrectly in their own slot (they had that offset double row of pins). Most of the time things just wouldn't work until you reseat the card, but every now and then you'd have a real bit of stink to air out.

Ahh electrical smoke. Good times, good memories.
 
I once dropped a Pentium Pro CPU, remember those, they were huge, onto a ceramic floor and it snapped in two pieces, we didn't get that server back up for a few days until a replacement came in.......oops
 
Reading this reminds me of a boner I did probably back in 2000 I think it was.. I had just built up a new system for myself using an AMD thunderbird chip , forgot to put the heatsink on. Yeah, the chip actually had a brown circle in the middle after I turned it off after about 5 seconds.

AMD was nice enough to replace the oem chip with what seemed to be a retail boxed one.

Forgot all about that until tonight.
 
Back in the day I was testing for a faulty motherboard and left the HSF off and a glob of old thermal paste was still on the processor. I booted the machine and stepped away for a glass of water to come back to a room filled with silver smoke.

...
 
my 2 stories to share. one time I was cleaning the inside of the computer with canned air while the computer was running. well the straw flew off the canned air and flew into the hsf for the cpu broke all the fins off the fan. The best thing I ever remember doing was when I was young my first ever LAN party I went to i walked in with my compaq desktop while looking at everyone with their custom computers. as I was walking there was about 50 guys all playing threewave quake 1 and i tripped over a powercord on the floor and took the whole side of the room out :) talk about some pissed off people lol, luckily I started running so no one knew who did it
 
I am happy to say I have never had any major accidents like the ones mentioned in this thread. I want to say it is quite entertaining to read, though, and serves as education for those of us who would become complacent.

I will say that the first time I ever installed a CPU it was the most nerve-racking experience of my life! It only took 1 second to slip it into the slot, but it might as well have been an entire day :eek:. The amount of pressure it took to push down the retaining clip was also alarming. The pay off was well worth it, though. I think that first build took me a good 3 hours to finish, and now I can throw one together in about a sixth of that amount of time :cool:.
 
The only one I can remember was trying to flash a SuperMicro 815 chipset using a BIOS from an 820 chipset. Poor 815 never had a chance. :(
 
I've been very careful ever since my first build back in 99, though I've had a few close calls with screw driver slips.

There was this one time though when I was having an issue and decided I would fix whatever it was without powering down the computer, and as I reached inside "CRACK" and then a loud buzzing sound. That was the sound of my finger meeting a delta fan, and it chopping the tip of it off! The buzzing it because one of the blades broke off. BLOOD!... man that was scary. Luckily for me, I didn't loose so much that it all didn't grow back; just 3 or 4mm and a fair sized chunk of my nail, and of course that gawd awful screaming delta fan.
 
Having worked at a local computer repair place to put myself through college, I have a million stories about stuff I've seen customers do to their systems. We had a guy bring in two identical Dell systems, and explain that he decided to add the RAM from one to the other to give himself some more memory on the first box for a project. Seems fine...except both the donor box and the target box were both on when he pulled the RAM out and put it into the target machine. He managed to kill the target machine doing that, and killed the donor when he stuck the now-fried RAM back into it (still powered on) to see if it was any good.
 
I feel bad as I only managed to connect usb port switching wires position by 180 degrees which resulted in really nice spark when i put flash memory into that usb.

Wondering for a moment if i managed to kill my brand new P965 mobo this way wasn't fun but it survived and even that usb port worked.

Only casualy was poor memory stick :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top