[CLOSED] Share your PC Building Horror Story and enter to win a 3070 Graphics Card!

Aditya

A couple of years ago I had developed an interest in PC's and me being relatively cheap and not the brightest I thought that the websites where you could get the cheapest possible parts would be legit... Thus, I ran over to my dad and said that I found a graphics card for 25$. Yea 25$. My dad being in a call and thinking I had some sort of common sense brushed me aside and let me buy it. I ran up the stairs as fast as I could and went to the website and entered my pay pal info. Thus when I got the actual box it was already crushed and inside was something in a foreign language. I put it in my rig and the PC never turned on. This was the day I realized I was an idiot.

Doremon458

My uncle and I were driving to the store in a dark night to buy some computers part so he can teach me how to build a PC. We bought the stuff then drove home, we leave the parts there for tomorrow when we woke up the CPU box was gone we went to the living and it was on the ground tore open and the CPU was on....  my dog poop, while i was cleaning it i tripped and drop the CPU and its looks like 50% of the pins are gone or broken. Then i turned around and yes my dog was licking on the Graphics card that i put on the chair and he was about to chew it. IT was an Santana wind day so a lot of static electricity builds up on my dog and so he licked the motherboard and it shocked my poor dog and my new motherboard that i wanted that just went out of stock and so i have to wait every morning at 5 o clock to try to get a new one and thats my horrible PC build experiment thankyou for reading.

jonbitzen

Probably the worst build disaster I had was my first HTPC.  It was an intel atom-based motherboard with an embedded nVidia GPU.  I remember waiting for my parts, putting them all together, then hearing a pop from the brand-new power supply.  The power supply basically blew itself up and took the motherboard along with it.  It was no big deal to return everything, but it was all by mail and so it took some time to turn everything around, and meanwhile I was very frustrated.

2nrd

2019, coming from soft tube watercooling, I decided to take the plunge and try hard tubing. I was terrified because the fittings works differently from soft tubing. It does not give you the feel of being as secure, but the o-rings in rigid tubing just simply works. After a week of planing my lines and gathering all the fittings needed, I went ahead and tested my luck. After hours and hours of bending and double-checking the fittings, I was confident in the lines and loop. The first hour of leak testing went great so I told myself, I'm good to go. Two days later, a small leak started to form. I didn't notice during the initial testing, but it was the outlet from the CPU fitting. While I was still running only distilled water, I thought I was still safe to just tighten it and continue running the PC.

After one certain sixteen hour work day, I came home and booted up the PC. Didn't boot. Saw a little water stain on top of the backplate of my 1080ti. Turned off the PC and took apart the water block. Come to find out, the fitting was still leaking. The GPU was fried.

Did the whole RMA process with EVGA. They replaced it with no questions.

Ran the new GPU one week later. Ran the new GPU and a new fitting where the original was leaking. Everything was solid for 2 days. Another fitting was leaking from the upper radiator and fried the second GPU instantly. Of course, EVGA replaced that GPU with no questions as well. Replaced all the fittings with quality Bitspower fittings, previously ran XSPC fittings, and now I'm on my third 1080ti and no leaks for a solid 2 years.

ChickadeePi

I'm a generally clumsy person, and during my first build, I dropped both my HDD and 1060 five feet to the ground. Both parts ended up being alright, which was nice.  

Yingdong

My first time building a pc, I followed the pc building guides online steps by steps, hanging the board on case first, and spent roughly four hours to install everything on the pc. When I finished, I found there was an extra seemingly very important steel plate. It turned out to be the I/O backplate.

cmac2k

My last build was my first build, and it was a 386, so quite a ways back.  I've been waiting / hoping for my (now 10 year old) son to get interested enough to want to build his own.  That finally happened, like a month ago - great timing (not!) considering the challenges of finding a decent affordable GPU.  I know this is a common situation these days, but this qualifies as my PC build horror story.  He has had his heart set on a 3070, so we have our fingers crossed!

DigitalBoy

I've been upgrading my old HP Elite tower that have Intel i7 by adding more memory, SSD drives, and better video card so I can do some video editing work.  I was hoping for RTX3060 or RTX3070 for my GPU to replace old Nvidia card that came with the system, but am able to get GTX1070 off from eBay due to GPU shortages.  It needs 8-pin power cable for video card and my system does not have it.  Also it came with 320W power supply!  What's more, it is proprietary and I cannot swap for a common ATX power supply.  So I have to be creative and came with a different approach.  I added a separate 12V, 300W power supply along with home made power control.  It came out nicely and video card works pretty good.  My system can handle any video cards up to 375W (300W add-on with 75W from PCIe slot).  Rule of thumb, always check and see if the system is capable of upgrading BEFORE buying the components!

bob_marley

To preface this story, I've been an avid PC builder for many years now and I have also previously associated with miners during the great GPU shortage, and have been collecting PC parts for MANY MANY years.
As long as I can remember, I've always loved working with computers and have always loved to help others as well. Throughout the years, I have built a number of computers with no issues for all my friends and family as well as some friends of friends. Never once have I experienced an issue that I couldn't fix with either Google or purchasing new parts, however, that decided to change during 2020 and 2021. 
 During 2020, when the pandemic first hit, I was extremely bored and had nothing to do with my time. As my workplace had been shutdown for a few months, and I was at home with no job during those months. I would often find myself wandering my house looking for something to do, when I would eventually remember that I loved to work on computers! And as quickly as I remembered, I would start building PC after PC. The first PC I had build was an older system, it had a 6700k with a Sabretooth Motherboard and 3 GTX 1070's in 3-way SLI, as a joke, the second PC I had built was a Ryzen 5 2600 with a B350M gaming pro motherboard paired with 64GB"s of ram, and the third PC I built was built from an 8700k with an RTX 2060 and 4gb's of ram. I would post all of these computers on my social media in order to get a kick out of it and was surprised to see that many of my friends had barely noticed that I have been building PC's for a while. 
 They would go on to get me to build many computers for them, ranging all budgets from $400 for a FULL set up, to a $4000PC, to even work on mining setups. Fast forward a few months around September. This is when I started experiencing issues with the computers I would build. The first PC I remember it occurring on was a Ryzen 5 3600 setup, with a B450 Aorus Pro Wifi, bought courteously from Microcenter, where I get all my parts . This PC in particular was being built for my neighbor and long time friend, as he knew I would build PC's and wanted me to build him one. Starting off on building the PC and I immediately experienced major issues, such as the PC not staying on. This would be from constant crashing/BSOD's. After days of troubleshooting, I eventually decided it was the ram after swapping out through 16 sticks of different DDR4 rams that I had as well as even getting a different motherboard, and CPU. The PC would finally let me install windows and I would be on my merry way. I finished the PC and would give it to him, with the hope that no more issues arise, alas, nothing lasts forever. 
 About a month later, my neighbor had come up to me and said his PC was constantly freezing and crashing, and asked me to take a look at it. I reluctantly took back the PC and started troubleshooting it. I replaced the CPU, GPU, Motherboard, RAM, PSU, Storage, everything; but would still have issues. "I have quite literally replaced everything but I'm still experiencing issues" I thought to myself. Stressed out of my mind, I gave up and gave him one of my computers of equivalent power and called it a day. This would only be the start of my issues.
Soon after that incident, the PC miraculously started working again with no issues. This made me extremely pleased as I was sure the CPU was dead (even though it had been swapped out). Coincidentally, I was asked to build another PC for a friend that lived 30 minutes away. I built the PC using those parts and paired it with a 1070 and drove the 30 minutes to get there and the 30 minutes back. 
 After a few days of silence from him, I get a call. Dreading the worst, I pick up it and hear "The PC is crashing sometimes, can you come take a look at it sometime?" I had never felt so betrayed by a PC before, after so much care and love went into building one, it still refuses to work properly. It would take a total of three trips as well as a whole new AMD CPU for me to give up on that PC once again and provide him with a 7700k and a 1070 in order to just settle things. Following that encounter with the combo again, I gave the CPU and motherboard to my brother since he needed a PC, and I was curious to see if he would experience any issues. Turns out, the CPU ran perfectly fine, getting the boost clocks that it wanted as well as staying extremely cool.
 This absolutely baffled me, as I was just watching him play games for hours without any issues. Irritated, I left and didn't bother to look at that PC for the next few weeks, when the RTX 3060TI came out. At this time, I was using another combo I had built which had consisted of a 9700f, which I had no issues with when I plugged in a GTX 1060 and 1070, never to experience an issue. 
I had camped out for the card a whole 23 hours before opening and was successful in grabbing one, as well as my friend who was camped near me. When I got home, I immediately plugged it into my PC and started trying it out, benchmarking it and running all types of games.
 That's when I noticed that I was lagging an awful ton and on games like Borderlands 3, the card was unable to run with DX12. Intrigued about what happened, I plugged the GPU into my friends PC with a 5600x and it ran perfectly fine, and grabbed his 3060TI and started experiencing the same thing. Not really wanting to deal with the issue, I decided it could've been a software or hardware issue so I immediately switched out everything to a different setup and it still ran horribly. I decided to switch it all back again into the 9700f build and decided that it was because XMP wasn't on, which was causing my stuttering. Upon turning on XMP, my PC BSOD'd and froze every time I would get into Windows. I switched out the ram to 3600 G.Skill ram that I had also acquired from MC and still the same issue. After hours of switching out parts and still leading to dead ends, I went to my brother's 3600 build and switched on XMP and plugged in the 3060TI, only for it to ruin the PC completely, causing a BSOD every time the PC turns on unless an underclock is applied to the CPU.
 And now here to the present. Yesterday I went to go build my friend a PC, who lives 20 minutes away from where I live. I spent hours and hours on his new hardline cooled PC and everything was going smoothly. I finished the PC and went home, the following night, he texted me on discord and told me "My PC isn't working, I can't get into settings to turn on XMP." Somewhat relieved that his PC isn't broken, I told him we can fix that later and guided him to bios through the boot screen and guided him to enabling XMP. Not even seconds after the restart, he booted into windows and his screen BSOD'd. Going back into bios, I told him to change the speed and voltages and to double check the speed of his ram but it all checked out, yet there were issues of BSOD'ing. We settled on reinstalling windows and it works with no issues now, except for the fact that we refuse to touch that horrendous "XMP Profile" button. What came to haunt me months ago is still haunting me to this day.

Oh and an old friend of mine also bought a used 980 ti and I plugged it into my PC only for it to fry and catch literal fire. Killed that horrendous 3600 finally.

SolPsiona

This was actually fairly recent. I was building my PC and was getting everything plugged in and set up. And for the very first time I was able to get the computer to post, and actually get into the bios and the main windows login. Because I checked the bios after logging in and getting some bench testing done I seen that my CPU was running really hot. So I checked it and decided I would put in a cooler I got at the store! So I had a bit of difficulty getting this new CPU cooler in and when I finally was able to get it seated and plugged everything back in. I was not able to get it to post at al! I tried replacing the motherboard and made sure everything was plugged in correctly. And nothing was working. So the next day two days I kept trying to figure out why it was not posting and had the great idea to check the bottom of the CPU. To my surprise I found the CPU thingy's were bent! In my installing of the new Cooler. I bent the CPU pins! I was so mad at myself for that. After I figured that out, I had it replaced and was able to get everything up and running again. 

JustinHoey

I was changing the cooler on my Ryzen, got all the screws and retention bar off, and then pulled. And pulled again, and nothing was budging. So I pulled reaaally hard and lifted a corner of it and got it to separate. Only one small problem: the CPU got stuck to the cooler and was ripped out of the retaining bracket, and in the process I bent four rows of pins and snapped one off. I bent them all back with a screwdriver and credit card over the course of three hours, and thankfully it still works.

RetroTech

Anyone ever walk into their home to be greeted by the distant sounds of short circuiting electronics? I have!

Picture it - Austin, 2006...

Upon investigating the somewhat alarming sounds, I discovered they were originating from my PC which I had just earlier in the day migrated over to a new case. I thought, “hrmmm, a connector must’ve come loose,” and I was just home for a brief minute so I simply unplugged the unit from the mains.

Well, a day or two later when I got around to checking out the PC to figure what was wrong, I discovered when removing the side panel that my components had been given a nice cold bath! Yup - a puddle of water greeted me.

Turns out, a certain person whom had just earned a new title, “EX” - decided to pour a cup of water through the fan located at the top rear of the case. Alas, this was one of the most magnificent displays of his endearing, *ahem* - “young and dumb” qualities.

Needless to say, all the components were fried and the couple of hours I spent transferring the components from the old case to the new one was just to give them a deserving send-off in a beautiful new case! At least the case wasn’t harmed and was able to welcome a new build a few years later.

PS - the EX went on to steal his deceased father’s identity and ended up in jail, or so I was later told. Really made my wet computer seem like an innocent accident! XD