Biggest PC Building Mistakes From The Community

Miscellaneous PC Building Mistakes

Our last few submissions don't quite fit into the aforementioned categories, but are still worth reading. Having come this far, I can't help but wonder how many stories about computer parts bursting into flames or melting I need to read before it becomes routine. I'm starting to think it never will. User "ausskiller" serves to remind us in entertaining fashion by accidentally melting a cable from the power supply.

"In the first PC I built (Celeron 433mhz @488mhz, TnT2 32mb) I made two pretty major mistakes:When I was first setting it up I noticed there was a port in the back of the CD drive for an audio connector, I found a loose cable that fit and plugged it in. When I went to boot the computer there was a massive puff of smoke and I immediately pulled the plug, afterwards I inspected the PC, freaking out that I had just totaled the PC I poured my lifes savings into, and noticed that the one of the wires of the "audio cable" I had plugged into the CD drive had completely melted off all the plastic coating and when I traced it back to it's source I realized it actually came directly from the PSU . I decided to tape up the now exposed wire, disconnect it from the CD drive and try to boot the PC again to see how much damage I had done, to my absolute amazement it booted up without any problems, and even more astonishing was that even the CD drive was working perfectly, the total sum of the damage was the plastic coating on a wire, man I felt lucky that day."

There is always a sense of accomplishment when you build a new PC and everything is fine, but when it doesn't start right up things can look dark. When this happens, it is best to check for simple causes to the problem before RMAing parts. Don't be like "KillSwitch07" and RMA half the PC because you forgot about the switch on the PSU.

"My biggest mistake was when i built my first pc (go figure) and built the whole thing, pressed the power button and nothing happened. So i completely took it all apart and rebuilt it. Still wouldn't power on, so i did a rma of the cpu, motherboard and gpu (this was my first pc dont laugh). While i was waiting on the cpu to get back i looked on the back of the psu, and saw the power switch i never flipped."

It is important to keep your PC cool, but it seems "Infikiran" may have taken it a little far. If the force of your fans is strong enough to rip components apart, you might want to get a little worried.

"On my second build I ever did I upgraded my CPU from a Pentium D to a Core 2 Quad 6700. I was nervous at the time to do watercooling so I stuck with air cooling. Still using a cheap case I only had an 80mm slot on the side and a 120mm slot on the back. I successfully overclocked the CPU to 3.0ghz from 2.67 GHz, but here's the issue. To compensate for limited fans for air cooling I bought a Thermaltake aftermarket cooler, "the copper seashell 92mm fan", 80mm Vantec Tornado case fan on the side "6000RPM". and a 3500 RPM Silverstone fan. PC was super loud as you could imagine, but after a couple days I noticed a loud banging noise inside my case.Powered off the PC and pulled the side off to see that the air current between the two powerful fans and broken the CPU fan completely off and the noise was the electromagnet trying to spin the broken fan. I took the fan off the heatsink altogether and used it as a passive heatsink. Temps were actually cooler after that."

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