The "All the Things that Have Gone Wrong During Builds" thread.

[Smoked Brisket]

I am sure that this has been done before but I thought I would start a catch-all thread to help builders when googling strange issues they might be having. During my recent x570 build I turned on the power and the mobo just started flashing and clicking like crazy. Turns out a few pins were not making good contact with the 24 pin power connector. This got me reminiscing about all the frustrating issues I haqve had in the past, always solved by finding someone who had the same issue in some obscure thread in a forum like this one. So I will start the list:

1.) Decided to watercool my old Sandybridge with an Asus Maximus Extreme. Transferred all the same parts to a new case, changed nothing. When I tried to power it up I got a never ending boot loop. The issue was solved by buying a cheap legacy keyboard and booting into windows once before using any usb device, weird.

2.) My first solid state drive was a mushkin 500gb. Had a power outage and when the power returned the device had simply disappeared from bios and appeared to be dead. The problem was solved by simply unplugging the sata cable for ten seconds from the drive. plugged it back in and it was as if nothing had happened.

3.) No matter how many builds I do I still, on occasion, see missing ram sticks because of improper seating! Listen for that click)

 

[OliverQueen]

I wouldn't know where to start over the past 30 or so years!

One that sticks in my mind was back in the old Socket 7 days with the i430TX chipset. Intel's flagship consumer chipset at the time which supported up to 128MB (yes MegaBytes!) of RAM (4 x SIMM's or 2 x DIMM's on the same board from memory although it may have been before the DIMM days). Trouble was that if you went to 64MB or above, the system would grind to a crawl almost regardless of OS installed at the time. Asus were stumped when I called them up, Intel were stumped when I called them up (after a massive merry go-round to get a number back in the mid-90's!). Finally discovered after trial and error that the chipset & any CPU be it AMD, Cyrix, Intel, etc could not cache anything above 64MB so turned off the L2 cache (from memory) when it detected amounts higher than 64MB! I remember a few months later seeing on the old Windrivers (remember that place before Internet.com bought Scott Hermanson out?) that others were having same problems and getting nowhere, same with Toms Hardware & Anandtech. When I said that it was a caching problem, I was told that I had no iidea what I was talking about!!! Few months later, there were articles etc on knowledge bases by Intel and the motherboard partners saying that the TX chipset could not cache above 64MB!!!! There was no problem with the more workstation orientated i430HX chipset though.

Another one was the old pencil trick with the Slot processors. The amount of machines I saw on my work bench in those days with people literally scribbling over almost the whole surface of the CPU was horrendous!!! I must have used hundreds of erasers before giving them a permanent solution with a metal paint pen.

Thought of another one that never happened to me but to other local tech's in the area back in the days before you had bootable CD's. I hacked together a CD-ROM driver from the OAK Systems drivers (which was the same one that MS used for their own boot disks later on!) into a batch file boot disk that would work with every IDE CD-ROM on the market at the time, so you didn't need to install DOS to install Windows 98 (from memory, as could also have been 95 as well but been a LONG time). The amount of these I sold to other local stores & techs paid for a holiday for me & a second hand car!!!! That was until I sent the ZIP file to Scott at WinDrivers to list on the homepage for all & sundry to download & use.

 

[King_Potato]

One that I have run into more than once is.... THAT DARN GRAPHICS CARD RETENTION CLIP ON THE MOBO!!!!

I have had that thing get stuck; it's either hard to get to or it doesn't function properly. Some campaniles especially prebuilts use their own style and they aren't always intuitive as to how they are supposed to operate.

I've had to do some brute force pulling out of graphics cards. Once or twice i had to break the retention clip. Another time a capacitor from a card got stuck on the retention clip. That was fun.

 

[t1k]

With one of my first builds I was putting together for a family member as a young teenager I didn't put motherboard spacers in, and the motherboard was smoking on boot. Fry's gave me a replacement board at no charge even after I explained what I did. It's possible the motherboard was just bad to begin with. I can't remember whether or not the motherboard required spacers or not or whether I even checked, and it's possible the technician I talked to at Fry's pointed out my mistake and had sympathy for me. I have since built dozens of PC's and have fortunately never fried anything since that incident. I just remember it scaring me and making me pay more attention to detail during builds.

Anyone else start any fires?

 

[Zepher]

I remember upgrading my friends PC one year from an Asus board and Core2Duo E6400 to an Intel board and Core2Quad Q9550 and having an issue with the PSU.
Pulled the entire machine apart, installed the new board and put everything back in and went to fire it up and all it would do was turn on for a second, then turn off, then turn on for a second, and then turn off.
Found out that that particular Antec PSU had issues with the Intel motherboard we were using.
Had to pull his machine back apart and install the old board. Went and got a different PSU the next day.
I bench tested the system first to make sure it would power on and post first before taking the old one back apart.

 

[Tapper]

First thing is never never use a cheep PSU. I was building a AMD 939 system back in the day and some one had got a PSU from some PC shop for £15. It was rated for 400 w. It was labeled euro power or something crappy like that. I went ahead and built it all and was pretty proud with my build untill I pressed the power switch.

Bang flames out the back of the PSU and it stunk my room out. After desperately grabbing and yanking out the power cable I dived to my open dor so I could get some clean air and make sure I had not shit my panse! I went back in to my room to see what the damage was after about 10 mins and found that there was a big lump of melted slag where the 24 atx plug should be on the mobo. I had told the dude not to get the PSU and he still got it and he did not listen. He will not get a cheep one again! The lucky fucker only had to change the mobo ram and cpu and drives were OK.

 

[Grebuloner]

When I built my Q6600 system (first time building completely from scratch), I had a fancy Thermaltake case to go with it (still do). I thought it was cool that it supported all sorts of board form factors and had little letter codes on the motherboard tray for where you were supposed to screw in the standoffs. Put standoffs in all the little "A" holes (heh), installed board, screwed in, etc. Started up...dead in 1/2 a second. Some troubleshooting...nothing, instant off. Pulled board out of case onto wooden bench. Dead. Then I looked at the case...there were a lot more standoffs installed than holes in the board to screw them in. Some were even right under the CPU socket.

The tray had been mislabeled and this noob completely shorted the motherboard. Was within the return window from the seller, said DOA, got a new board, didn't make the same mistake twice (not counting that I shouldn't have bought that board in the first place...but that's a different story).

 

[Fix Me]

Back when I was more inexperienced I shorted out a CD-ROM drive. I don't even remember how I managed that, lol.

I grabbed the wrong modular cable for my PSU and killed two hard drives. I've been way more careful ever since!

Just this weekend I upgraded my CPU to an AMD 3900x and was intending to keep my old cooler, a Noctua Dh-15. I had to buy a mounting bracket for it since it wasn't sold with it when I bought it. I accidentally bought the wrong one and didn't realize it until the holes for the screws weren't lining up properly. D'oh! I just installed it with the stock cooler until the proper bracket arrives. The stock cooler is all LED blingy, so I think it all looks a bit ridiculous at the moment, lol.