Share the worst experience/mistake/skrew-up you had/made while building a PC.
Not mine, but I heard of someone who screwed his motherboard DIRECTLY into the case w./out the standoffs.
And left it like that without knowing the harm for months!
i bought a 50 dollar graphics card...i returned it the next day because it ran slower than no graphics card, so the moral is dont bother buying a graphics card unless you can dump atleast 100 U.S dollars in just the one.
So the graphics card was slower than your integrated?
What card was this?!
I know this story all to common... I know lots of kids who tell their parents they 'need a video card' for gaming... Said parent goes to electronics 'Big Box', talk to idiot sales rep, come home with Nvidia GTX 240 (I wish I was joking...). What makes it worse is the parent's "friend" who has a degree in computer science is the one who recommended the part... I ruined a perfectly good desk smashing my face into it hearing this news.
never listen to fanboy-friends. a friend of mine told me to get a gtx 480 instead of a amd 7970ghz because amd is crap. (I bought a r9 280x--> more or less a 7970)
I had a laptop that was terrible at overheating, so i always had to keep it on a surface that allowed good airflow and whatnot. However my girlfriend wanted to watch things in bed, with the comp on a plush blanket, with all the vents blocked :(. It crashed due to overheating, she thought oh well better turn it back on....3 times before she and it finally gave up. It fried the motherboard.
oh god the 480s
the power consumption. the heat. the speed.
This happened to me about 7 or 8 years ago when I was a kid. I had a crap Compaq Presario desktop, and I remember thinking I could buy a powerful graphics card for $100, pop it in, and I'd be set. So I told my technologically illiterate father (he can do basic stuff, but he knows nothing about hardware) to get me a graphics card for Christmas. That's it. A graphics card. So sure enough I got one. Then I had no idea what to do with it, so I asked my Dad what to do with it. Turns out it was some $50 weak ATI Radeon card he got from Best Buy, and the one in my Compaq was more powerful.
Yea I was pretty stupid back then, until I got my Xbox hard-modded and learned how to mod Halo 2 (make and play cool custom maps, not turn on god mode, auto aim instakill cheats like those douches you would run into in matchmaking.) Then I got into Oblivion modding, then PC building, and here I am :)
I remember building my first PC about 13 years ago, and forgetting the motherboard standoffs. Quick exchange for a "defective" motherboard and PSU at Frys later that day, and I was up and running. Yeah...my younger brother still won't let me live that one down.
Probably others have done this one. Have you ever forgotten to plug the power into your graphics card? It was my 8800GT and it started beeping and screaming, was awful :(
Old junker, motherboard did not fit in this case I had, so I keep it sideways and just later the mother board in. It would shut down when ever the tower was knocked. Or the video card was moved/ VGA cable tuged.
I'm guessing is was a Nvidia GT 610 or something similar xD
Did anything break?
Nah it was fine.
As a noob building my PC last week the only "wrong" thing i did was try and test if it worked by plugging my monitor into my motherboard plugin while i had a graphics card in (since the graphics card only had HDMI, Display port, DVI-I, and DVI-D.
Had a old intel computer. While nothing serious was wrong with it . Everything minor was wrong with it everytime you would boot it. It was nothing but constant, minor issue to minor issue, everyday. With that being said, Its the reason I started building amd computers.
yeah, the funny thing was that he thought I'm new to PC's and I was like "480? nope!"