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

brood

Way back in the Pentium 1 days my dad and I got a 15GB hard drive, a huge upgrade to our 1GB which was nearly full.  He attached it and let me screw it in (I was about 11 at the time, he would get me do a bit here and there so I would learn). We couldn't get the drive to be recognized, so we took it out and checked the jumper pins and connections, but nothing. After playing with different settings, we gave up on it and my dad decided to ask a friend for help. He knew this guy from a Ham radio club and I think he was an engineer, so my father had the utmost confidence in him. Well, he was wrong. The guy was fiddling with the drives with the power on, and had them hanging loose off the IDE cable, as my dad would say furiously in reference to this event for years after, "LIKE A BUNCH OF FISH!". He knew it was sketch, but for some reason he was compelled to not back seat drive and say anything.  Our working drive's board shorted out with a pop and smoke. To add insult to injury, the guy was aloof and just said "Oh well, it happens". My dad was irate, to the point where he never talked to this guy ever again.  Turns out the motherboard only supported up to 10GB drives, and we got it going with one of those.     

afreecaFreek

My first desktop computer was a gift for starting college - running an AMD FX 8320 and Nvidia 750Ti. My friends had just called me up to play some competitive CSGO matchmaking while I had recently gotten into a multiplayer Civ V game. Not wanting to leave the Civ game I decided to try to play both games at the same time having utter faith that my computer would be able to handle  both games at the same time. After about two rounds into the CSGO match, I heard a pop, smelled burning, and saw some smoke waft out of the top of my PC case. My CPU/Mobo completely gave out due to overheating and some capacitors blowing, and I ended up upgrading to the i7 6700K berating myself the entire time rebuilding the computer. Never have I ever left a Civ game open while playing a different game since then.

Norton

Horror for me is the stupid ones. Like years ago when I sent a customer motherboard for replacement with a M2 SSD still attached to it... No data loss since it was a cache SSD, but I paid a new one out of pocket. But nothing beats the good old taking our new build apart because it does not turn on, but it's only the PSU switch set to 220V.

JPSHRACER

My computer horror story is of the first time I was building my first custom built computer. I was having a family friend help me with the installation. We got all the way to turning it on. He decided to use the wall outlet. I plugged in a surge protector. The surge protector light was red and said the outlet was not properly grounded. He said "that it did not matter". He turned on the computer, it spun up and then immediately shutdown. That was the last of that motherboard. I had the board Return Merchandize Authorization process and decided to go with a different motherboard company. My parents had an electrician come out and fixed the outlet afterwards. It would be several more months before I would get the computer rebuilt. I went to a computer tech support store to have them build the custom built computer. However, I got the custom built using the new motherboard up and running in the end. 😇

Zvalen812_

My story was very hectic. A couple years ago I was making my first gaming pc. We had turned the computer on its side on our low height table where we were working. We had first static shocked our first cpu, so we got another. Then when it was time for the motherboard we noticed that the deal we got was too good to be true, we got used 4gb DDR3 RAM instead of a 16gb DDR4 stick. So we had to return it, and while we were waiting for our real stick, we decided to set up our water cooling device. While doing that, our thermal paste dot was way bigger than a pea, so we had to restart. While we were grabbing paper towels to clean it up, the family dog decided it was a good idea to chew the power supply cords and poop on the ssd that was right outside of the case, luckily it was still in the original package so it was not a big deal. We ordered new psu cords. While trying to put on the water cooling block, we lost a screw for it, but we had a back up. Terrible first time building (:, but I have had the computer for more than 2 years now and it is still running well.

ccantera

This last Christmas I got a new case, motherboard, and CPU fan. I took everything out of my old case and was left with my old motherboard with the CPU and stock cooler on it. I take off the stock cooler but the CPU comes off with it and is stuck on the cooler. I searched online to see how to take off the CPU without damaging it and used dental floss to try and remove it. While doing that my hand slipped and it resulted in several bent CPU pins. I thought it was over for me but I saw you can try to straighten them and I tried but that only resulted in a broken CPU pin. I expected my Christmas to be me playing Cyberpunk 2077 all day but it instead I ended up with a broken CPU. I had to wake up early the next day to go Micro Center to buy a new CPU. Probably the worst Christmas I've had.

BeastJvalen9654

I have made 2 PCs over the past like 8-10 years, and both of them had some problems. The first one was when I was a beginner, barely knew what to buy and how to build it. I ended up buying my fans and GPU through eBay. When I got them, the fans were broken and the fan on the GPU was not working and the GPU started smoking as soon as I tried to start it. These were some of the first parts I bought so it was not a strong start. Otherwise, the first build went smoothly and I didn't have much difficulty building it. The second build was much more recent and it involved way more problems throughout the short life it lived. The purchasing process went much smoother, it was during assembly that the first problem occurred. I had my baby nephew over at the time, I stepped away for a moment and when I came back, the CPU pins were bent because he chewed on it after thinking it was a toy. I got a new CPU and finished the building process smoothly. After it was built, a friend was over and spilled a drink on the top of the box, which then dripped right onto the fans and ports of the case and shorted it out. I didn't know this happened until the next day when I went to start it up, but it was too late. 

Shea_

Five years of playing on a budget gaming laptop throughout college, I finally gathered enough frustration with the freezes and enough money to dedicate myself to building a new laptop. I consulted my more dedicated gaming friends for advice and we picked out the parts together. Albeit a bit naïve at the start, I quickly realized that those five years only led up to disappointment, with no GPU's in sight. A pandemic, a climb in the value of bitcoins, and a never ending army of scalpers all plagued my dream. A tragic ending of a PC never built, but definitely a horror story.

MCLover

I spent $700 to build my first PC in Nov 2019. I just realized that I've spent $1,000 more to upgrade parts like better CPU, GPU, RGB RAM, PSU... Guys, stay away. This is a dangerous and horrifying hobby.

ScientiaDomini

This all started with a friend gifting me an old i5 8400 and a mobo along with it.

I had a pretty old 6th gen processor at the time and he happened to be upgrading his PC. He decided to gift his old stuff to me so I went to work upgrading my current rig with the new mobo and cpu. Started putting everything together and I realized I didn't have a cooler. I made a trip to the nearest PC supply store and purchased the cheapest bequiet tower cooler I could find. Standard intel stock mounting system. Easy enough right? Somehow I managed to mangle all of the plastic pins that hold the cooler to the motherboard before I could get it secured on the motherboard. I was distraught. How in the world am I going to use this new cpu without a cooler?

So I did what any logical man would do and I grabbed my nearest discarded intel stock cooler out of the miscellaneous parts bin, took it to my workbench where I'm rebuilding my pc, and cannibalized the pins from the intel cooler to reuse in the tower cooler I just purchased. After struggling with the pins for 20-30min and battling more bent plastic (you'd think that removing intel's pushpins out of the cooler would be easy right? wrong.) I managed to get the cooler to stay on the motherboard without any of the pins miraculously popping out of their hole and ruining the mounting pressure of the cpu.

Its a wonder I didn't bend the socket pins during all of this....

Suzukii

So here is my horror story at attempting to build my own PC after 5 long years of no builds.
The quick version.  I returned everything due to a frustrating experience at the store and the lack of, new, unopened ND unavailable 5950X CPU's.
To continue It's a moot point now since I've already returned the CPU to the store and got a refund for it along with a refund for everything else I had purchased to put a new system together, minus the new ATX enclosure and 3070 GPU.  I had to return the CPU and everything else associated with a new build because no one at the store knows or are not at liberty to forward the information as to when the next batch will be coming in, and I definitely don't know if I would have been getting a 5950X CPU in the near future with the way things are with the lack of inventory, and I didn't want to get stuck with faulty hardware that I could not return should anything else be defective.

A bit of my background experience: I'm 50 years old and have been in the I.T. industry since the 90's holding an A-Plus, Network+, CCNA and the MCSE certifications for over 15+ years (and have been building my own PC's for 20+ years).  I mention this just to give one a glimpse and a bit of insight.  In telling  this I'm not professing, by no means, nor do I wish to give anyone the idea that I am some kind of a know-it-all.  I'm just a bit seasoned in the build your own PC arena.

I've learned a lesson in making future purchases and making returns of any items back to Microcenter.  After being a 15-20+ years, long and loyal customer, the treatment I received and suffered at the store this past Monday evening which I feel was undeserving and unwarranted.  

It all started when at first, within a couple of days of making the CPU purchase, along with everything else required to get a new PC up and running, I took the questionable 5950X CPU back to the Paterson store since I couldn't get it to work.  However using the same hardware I could get a 3950X CPU working in the same mobo hardware.  The store staff and a manager had the audacity to tell me at the store that they were going to charge me $40 to inspect and test the CPU I had just purchased in the store less than 48 hours ago to verify if it's functionality while telling me that I had to wait 1 1/2 weeks because of the backlog. This all started because I was so excited about having gotten my hands on an AMD 5950X CPU that upon purchasing it I had neglected to look at the CPU's packaging when I paid for it at the register. Because I was in a bit of a  bereavement state, due to a recent loss hours earlier, and waiting almost 3 hours on a line in 26 degree (Fahrenheit) weather, 

I didn't get to the CPU sitting in the Microcenter shopping bag for 24 hours after the purchase, only to find out that the packaging which the CPU comes in, the hard plastic clam shell, had already been cracked open, and had no external seal to break in the 1st place, prior to my purchasing it. In my excitement I said what the hell, and decided to try the CPU anyway. After trying for almost 3 or 4 days, I returned with the processor to the store and they basically looked at me like I was some sort of a guilty criminal with something to hide upon producing the CPU.   Normally I was asked by the cashier why I was returning CPU, after almost 1 minute later, of the register cashier pulling the CPU out of its plastic packaging bare handed, with no antistatic protection gear.   When I was asked by the cashier  as to what was wrong with it, I proceeded to explain how I received the CPU in the 1st place and a minute later he waved a manager over and now there were 2 people at the store register scrutinising the CPU.  Now the two gentlemen  were feverishly scrutinising the CPU,  as if though all of a sudden they were CPU Engineers with microscopes for eyes, handling the CPU with their bare hands and, again, no antistatic protective gear.  They proceeded to tell me that the CPU had a couple of bent/misaligned pins of which I could not see with my bare eyes, nor with my reading glasses on.  The glances and distrusting looks that I was receiving from each of them for about 2 minutes, were unnerving and I had to keep my composure before I told them what was really going through my mind.  Finally, the manager stated he would take it back, but he didn't hold back on giving me a lecture and a warning, as if speaking down to a miscreant child.  He stated he would make an exception, "this one time for me", in accepting the return.

The possible next time I go to purchase anything at Microcenter I will make sure it is not an open item of any kind. The customer service I received that day was unwarranted, undeserving and unprofessional   I am sure that someone could scrutinise the video of the event this past Monday evening, between 7pm and 8pm, of them hovering over the processor when I returned it and study my body language to see how uncomfortable they made me, a long time, loyal, frequently returning customer.  After this experience I will not make Microcenter my 1st choice for purchasing tech enthusiast high-end items  Instead I will make my future purchases more frequent online 1st.  

Well, one less person to get onto the wee hour lines waiting for that hard to get opportunity to score a great piece enthusiast item.  

Sad as to how far this store,  in Paterson, has fallen.  Really sorry for the long rant.

MNPolarbear

I think the worst building nightmare I ever had to deal with was when a friend was trying to do someone else a favor trying to save them money by doing a home built PC for them.  As he was new to building PCs, he did not know about how CPUs are keyed when inserting them into the motherboard.  As such he inserts the CPU the wrong way and manages to bend a few pins on it trying to clamp it into place.  This was on a LGA socket 478 CPU.  I grabbed his lighted magnifying glass, the smallest precision screw driver and the smallest needle nose pliers he had.  With a little patience I was able to bend the few bent pins back in place so the CPU would drop into the socket properly and he wouldn't need to replace the CPU.  Talk about a sigh of relief when the PC posts and we can start installing the OS.

Suzukii

I wish that had been my case before returning the 5950X CPU I waited for on a 3+ hour line last week in Paterson.  It was DOA and it drove me nuts.  Please to anyone reading this: Do NOT ACCEPT ANY CPU'S or OPEN RAM from the store unless they can test it right there in front of you otherwise suffer the experience I was given by the store staff upon trying to return the item.  And by no means should one have to pay for the item in question to be tested if the item in question is 14 days or less from the purchase date.MNPolarbear said:

I think the worst building nightmare I ever had to deal with was when a friend was trying to do someone else a favor trying to save them money by doing a home built PC for them.  As he was new to building PCs, he did not know about how CPUs are keyed when inserting them into the motherboard.  As such he inserts the CPU the wrong way and manages to bend a few pins on it trying to clamp it into place.  This was on a LGA socket 478 CPU.  I grabbed his lighted magnifying glass, the smallest precision screw driver and the smallest needle nose pliers he had.  With a little patience I was able to bend the few bent pins back in place so the CPU would drop into the socket properly and he wouldn't need to replace the CPU.  Talk about a sigh of relief when the PC posts and we can start installing the OS.

Brik

My first PC build was a B50 Phenom II and I had NO IDEA what I was idea. I put everything together and couldn't figure out how to turn it on. I saw a post about putting a penny on the two posts for the power switch but I ended up putting the penny to the CMOS Clear switch and somehow ended up burned up the BIOS. Had to RMA the motherboard after hours of working on it and there wasn't a giant catalog of youtube tutorials or diagnostic tools online

Coconuts

On my first build I plugged the HDMI cable into the mobo instead of the graphics card and felt despair when nothing displayed on screen.

Kayaker

This was way back in the 20th century.  

Had just upgraded a computer for a sweet lady and I was proud.  Pride and inexperience led me to confidently connect the 2.5 inch floppy drive to its power connector as the final piece in this upgrade.  Only I inserted it backwards.  Didn't realize it until the power supply popped and fizzed on first fireup.  I felt really bad for my customer as the 'young tech hotshot' screwed up and knocked her computer out of use for several days. 

Hardware today is much more idiot proof as connectors can only go in one way. 

hiddenGamer28

The computer I am using now is actually a friend built hand me down I got a few years ago when my pre-built dell died.  I've had it for about 5 years and it uses an i7-870 so that should tell you how old it is in general.  I've replaced some computer components before but have never really built a computer, but during the quarantine I discovered build guides on YouTube and was excited to build a computer myself.  I am out of work so I can't afford a whole new computer, but as I was watching the videos I started to notice little things about my computer that I could fix.  The main things I saw were; there was no cable management, the cpu cooler was mounted facing straight up rather than with the air flow, and the rear fan would stop moving and required me to physically spin the blades to start it up again. 

I started with the fan and replaced that pretty easily.  There was another fan in the front that had never worked and it turns out it was never plugged into the header.  I downloaded the mobo manual to find the front header and fixed that too.  I tried to do the cable management but the case was so old and there was no room to work so I asked for a new case for Xmas.  I figured it would be easy enough to just switch the cases but it took way longer than I expected.

The first problem I ran into was that one of the screws wouldn't unscrew from the motherboard.  In fact, when I unscrewed it, it pulled out the riser from the case itself.  Luckily it still fit into the new case even with the other screw so that ended up turning out ok.  It took way longer than I thought it would, but I managed to get everything done in about 2 hours and went to turn it on and............nothing.

No post, no screen, no error, nothing.  It would run and all the fans would turn on, but nothing would appear on the screen.  I had to hard shutdown by holding down the power button, but a couple seconds later it would always restart.  I ended up having to pull the power to get it to stay off so I could work on it.  I pulled out the ram and put it back in (one stick didn't go in all the way so the mobo yelled at me for that).  I pulled out my graphics card and put it back in.  I redid all the wires for the front panel, I checked all the screws, I checked all the wire connections, I took out and reinstalled the PSU.  Nothing worked. 

After 3 hours trying to get it to post, I was about to give up.  I decided to go back to the old case to see if there was anything I missed.  I gave it a good shake and a teeny tiny little piece of beige plastic fell out from behind one of the panels.  I went to google and looked up pictures of my motherboard and compared those to the manual and it was the bios config jumper.  At this point I was extremely upset because I broke off a very important piece of the motherboard and I wasn't sure if it could even be fixed.

But while I was reading the manual I noticed that there were 3 pins the jumper plugged into.  I looked at the motherboard and there were 3 pins still.  It was at this point I realized it just slides onto the pins.  I placed it on and it started right away.  At this point I thought about the 3 hours I had just wasted because of this tiny piece of plastic.  

tldr: on my first computer build the mobo bios config jumper fell off in the old case and it took me 3 hours to figure that out.

Darkle_Gray

The Story begins the day before college classes are slated to start. I have my trusty Dell prebuilt XPS from the 2010 vintage and saw that Windows 10 needed to update. I allowed it to reset and waited...and waited...and waited. It rebooted, then nothing. Then rebooted again. Insert infinite regress boot cycle. I take a coffee break, hoping it magically fixes itself, but woe unto me, it does not.

Now, I need a computer, and the only place I can think of to look for one is Micro Center. I brave the wild crowds and wander the store, and find myself in the prebuilt and monitor side, where I end up with a refurbished HP prebuilt. Why not? less work and I can get up and running. Think again. I get it home, fire it up, and look inside. No way I can use this. Non-upgradeable without an immense amount of work and money.

So back to the store I go, with the resolve to go with my original idea of finally building my very first pc, from the ground up. I've repaired and replaced plenty of components in my time but never built one from the start. I have a Powerspec 750 watt power supply, Samsung Evo SSD and a 4TB spinning rust,  and a GTX 780 from my recently befuddled Dell, along with 2 Acer XV240Y monitors for the cause. With this in mind, I proceed to gather the needed items, with a Ryzen processor, open box MSI B450 motherboard, Ram, and a Lian Li case.

Got my prizes home, and cleared the desk. Open the motherboard, and find...the backplate was missing, and also refused to show any signs of life. So... back to the store. Perusing the open box motherboards again, I find an ASUS ROG B450 motherboard that not only works but offers me so much more for now and in the future. 

And after all that work, extra trips to and from my local Micro Center, and the headaches of building my first bespoke computer I now have a pretty decent rig, with a mid-range mobo, Ryzen 5 3600, and a ton of potential for the future for upgrades. In particular, a much more modern RTX or RX video card, a VR rig, more memory, and an NVME drive.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading this, and I am genuinely excited to have been able to do this. It's something I've been wanting to do for a long time, and it feels great to accomplish this and bring it into reality. 

EmmaB

During my first and only build I put the CPU in without lifting the retention arm and continued to tighten the cooler on top of it. I had been trying for a solid 10 minutes to get the CPU to fit properly and finally thought I had done it.  I had no idea what I had done and ended up going to a computer shop to find my mistake.  Luckily none of the pins were bent but I spent about 50$ for them to find and fix it. 

zeigan

Years ago I learned the hard way the damage static electricity can do on a processor. And why it's never a good idea to hand straighten bent pins on one carelessly. They just snapped right off. 

AndrewC

I don't have any serious horror stories from building pc's, but on my first build we could not get the pc to post. It was mine and my brother's first build and we finally found out that the pc was not plugged into the monitor. This frustrated us because we just could not figure out what was wrong. Finally we found the unplugged cord and fixed the problem.

MattNemesis

Funny story/unfortunate stories, but the pc build went fine, I was driving back from microcenter to my parents house to pick up some tools to ultimately build my bros new pc at my townhome, AMD FX-6100, 2x 4GB DDR3 1600 ram sticks, EVGA GTX 560, ASUS AM3+ M5A97 motherboard, Thermaltake V3 Black edition case, kingwin 120mm blue led case fans, Hyper 212 EVO cooler. On my way back to my place I had all the pc parts in the front passengers seat buckled up nice and safe. The motherboard box fell off the seat to the passengers side leg room area. I reached down to grab it to make sure it was ok while driving, I veered right just a little bit, on my parents street not to the point of hitting the pavement, but one of the houses mailboxes was tilted a little bit too much into the street, to which my passengers side mirror hit it and ripped off and did damage all down the side of my car, around 3600 dollars in damage and a mailbox replacement lol. 

Also did a build for a friend at his house and was finishing up to make sure the Windows install went ok and it booted (he was going to install the drivers, (he got all the parts from microcenter the previous day), my reward was a 6 pack of beer. Upon leaving and driving home, 2 cars in front of me braked really hard to try to avoid an animal but ran over an Opossum anyway,  the person in front of me braked, I braked and avoided hitting the person, the person behind me rear-ended me at 45 mph and I poped in my seat lifting my foot off the brake (manual car) and physics made hit the person in front of me, completely totaling my car. The car was a Dodge Dart 6-speed turbo edition. If I stayed to install the drivers on the pc I would have avoided the situation lol.

Coming home from microcenter recently to try to get a new GPU with no luck, a pickup truck in front of me veered to avoid a piece of aluminum on the highway, he kicked it up and it hit the front of my car and glancing off the passangers side of the hood, did some damage and ended up get a flat tire yesterday because of it also lol. Not begging to get this GPU, but I cant deny the facts lol, gl to all!

Suzukii

MattNemesis said:

Funny story/unfortunate stories, but the pc build went fine, I was driving back from microcenter to my parents house to pick up some tools to ultimately build my bros new pc at my townhome, AMD FX-6100, 2x 4GB DDR3 1600 ram sticks, EVGA GTX 560, ASUS AM3+ M5A97 motherboard, Thermaltake V3 Black edition case, kingwin 120mm blue led case fans, Hyper 212 EVO cooler. On my way back to my place I had all the pc parts in the front passengers seat buckled up nice and safe. The motherboard box fell off the seat to the passengers side leg room area. I reached down to grab it to make sure it was ok while driving, I veered right just a little bit, on my parents street not to the point of hitting the pavement, but one of the houses mailboxes was tilted a little bit too much into the street, to which my passengers side mirror hit it and ripped off and did damage all down the side of my car, around 3600 dollars in damage and a mailbox replacement lol. 

Also did a build for a friend at his house and was finishing up, (he got all the parts from microcenter the previous day), my reward was a 6 pack of beer. Upon leaving and driving home, 2 cars in front of me braked really hard to try to avoid an animal but ran over an Opossum anyway,  the person in front of me braked, I braked and avoided hitting the person, the person behind me rear-ended me at 45 mph and I poped in my seat lifting my foot off the brake (manual car) and physics made hit the person in front of me, completely totaling my car. The car was a Dodge Dart 6 speed turbo edition. Unfortunate loss but for PC building all worth it.

Def. unfortunate events for you.
If I were you I'd stop drinking and building.PC's or at least have a designated PC equipment handler on speed dial.

MattNemesis

Suzukii said:

MattNemesis said:

Funny story/unfortunate stories, but the pc build went fine, I was driving back from microcenter to my parents house to pick up some tools to ultimately build my bros new pc at my townhome, AMD FX-6100, 2x 4GB DDR3 1600 ram sticks, EVGA GTX 560, ASUS AM3+ M5A97 motherboard, Thermaltake V3 Black edition case, kingwin 120mm blue led case fans, Hyper 212 EVO cooler. On my way back to my place I had all the pc parts in the front passengers seat buckled up nice and safe. The motherboard box fell off the seat to the passengers side leg room area. I reached down to grab it to make sure it was ok while driving, I veered right just a little bit, on my parents street not to the point of hitting the pavement, but one of the houses mailboxes was tilted a little bit too much into the street, to which my passengers side mirror hit it and ripped off and did damage all down the side of my car, around 3600 dollars in damage and a mailbox replacement lol. 

Also did a build for a friend at his house and was finishing up, (he got all the parts from microcenter the previous day), my reward was a 6 pack of beer. Upon leaving and driving home, 2 cars in front of me braked really hard to try to avoid an animal but ran over an Opossum anyway,  the person in front of me braked, I braked and avoided hitting the person, the person behind me rear-ended me at 45 mph and I poped in my seat lifting my foot off the brake (manual car) and physics made hit the person in front of me, completely totaling my car. The car was a Dodge Dart 6 speed turbo edition. Unfortunate loss but for PC building all worth it.

Def. unfortunate events for you.
If I were you I'd stop drinking and building.PC's or at least have a designated PC equipment handler on speed dial.

Lol, didn't drink any of it until I got home of course because my car got totaled, the cop laughed at me because I was taking a 6 pack of unopened beer out of the trunk (at least it opened before it got towed and the beer wasn't damaged lol). Luckily everyone was ok in that ordeal, the person that rear-ended me, his car was totaled also. 

Abdel

I m hear to learn how to build computers  thank you

someguynamedmatt

I've been building PC's now since around 1997 as a hobby. I have two specific horror stories.
1) Around 2000 the AMD thunderbird core processors came out and I wanted a new 750MHz computer, complete with 512MB of RAM. WHOA what speed (cue doge meme). The board I had gotten was a Biostar mATX board that had a built in graphics card. Extremely rare chipset, too, that if you ever lost the driver floppy, you were toast. I did. Went to reload WIN98 and 640x480 graphics FTL. A friend of mine lent me an ATI Rago Pro 32MB to test out. I plugged it in, booted up to a wonderful BSOD over and over again. Suddenly smelled smoke coming from the PC. Turns out the power supply was a puny 200w unit that barely took care of combo I had in there, and the video card drew just enough current and voltage through the MOBO that it wrecked my system. This was before the days of DVRM and AVRM and all the other acronyms for voltage and amperage signals that help clean up the power. CPU survived, but the PSU, HDD, MOBO and my pci modem all died. Went to a computer show the next week, repurchased what was needed and had a new rig with a 400w PSU.

2) I've NEVER done a watercooling or other exotic cooling solution and decided that 2015 was the year to do one. Intel 4790K, EVGA SLI 970's, Gigabyte Z97 MOBO. Alphacool GPU waterblocks, EK CPU block, 120mm and 360mm radiators with an Eheim pump. Took me nearly a week to fully customize and assemble into an OLD Antec P120w. I made sure every fitting was clamped and leak tested for 48 hours, just to be safe. Fast forward two weeks. I'm sitting at my desk looking at my bay mounted reservoir and realize that the water level has dropped. Significantly. It's a dual bay reservoir and the pump is external, so volume in the reservoir is maxed out. It's got to be at least 500ml that has gone missing. So I take a look inside and see nothing, no drips, no dye anywhere. I go to refill it, and that's when the leak reveals itself. The fitting, although screwed in, had somehow backed out of the upper 970 waterblock. The water had been dripping onto the lower GPU and traveled along the hot backplate, then traversing back under the backplate, dropping onto the PCB. Tried to dry it all out, only to find the damage had already been done. The GPU had somehow kept going despite the damage, but although I had cleaned it up, it was time for that GPU to say farewell. Sure enough the regulators were cooked. After ripping all of it out, redoing everything, I went to power it up, and another unseen leak above the PSU, this time, dripped right into it. SEVERAL large pops later, I was ordering a new corsair 1100w. Ever since then when it's maintenance time, I triple check everything, run a spare external PSU just for the pump before ever plugging anything in. Although I loved building the PC, I don't know that I will ever do another watercooling build, especially when the efficiency level of components continues to improve. BTW, this rig is still my home daily rig. Looking forward to running a 3070 in it one day.

Thomaschio

My build nightmare is a long one..... Initially my build was great, worked fine. The nightmare comes in with the intervention on my son who was 2 and a half at the time. This child poured an entire cup of juice in the top of my computer when I was at work. At first I tried cleaning everything off with alcohol. At first, it seemed like the only part that actually bought it was the motherboard, I thought I was lucky. One hundred dollars and 3 hours of drive time to Microcenter is getting off easy considering the circumstances. After rebuilding my computer and reinstalling everything it booted up. I was extremely happy, until 3 hours later when my GPU decided to pick up a heavier smoking habit than mine. Next paycheck, 3 more hours of driving and 400 dollars later I get a new gpu. At the time it wasn't a terrible thing, I was able to get a nice upgrade. Everything booted up fine it was working marvelously until i started to game. The over current protection started tripping. As anyone still reading this would guess it, another 3 hour drive to get a power supply. Fast forward a week and several memory errors later. I make another 3 hour drive because the RAM did not survive the juice unscathed. Thanks to my son, i now realize it is possible to put more miles than dollars into a computer.

afernandez28

Unfortunately my PC Build Horror Story is still taking place as we speak! Scammed out of Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Graphics Card on Ebay
Since the middle of last summer in 2020 I have been slowly accumulating all the parts on my custom build list for my very first PC build, but the only remaining part I need would be the 3070 Graphics card that I've been searching for day in and day out! Now we all know the industry shortage on these graphics cards and the overwhelming demand causing a severe supply shortage, but what makes it worse is the bots and scalpers that have these take the limited supply of graphics cards only to resell for a much higher price leaving those who actually need the card without one ! While searching online for any available supply I figured I would entertain the idea of looking at some of the scalper prices on Ebay, but boy was that a mistake! I found a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card (the one I wanted for my build) which was still asking for more than the stock price ($500), but it was about $100 less than what others wanted for it ($700 instead of $800). Knowing how fast any available graphics cards are taken, I knew I needed to act fast if I wanted a shot at obtaining one! The rush of adrenaline pushed me to taking out my card and buying it with no hesitation, but this is where it all went wrong...I misread the description of the item and bought A PICTURE OF THE GRAPHICS CARD FOR $700!!! Now I know this is entirely my fault for acting too quick without throughly looking through the details, but after searching for months I have grown anxious and jumped at the first opportunity! So now here I am needing only the graphics card to finish my first ever PC build, but I am sitting with just a picture of it and not the real thing out of $700 on top of that...hopefully my luck can change with this contest!

Karter

I’ve had 3 build story’s. The first one was with my first and second pc builds, I was building my pc and my grandparents office pc, and when I went to download windows 10 onto a thumb drive from my old windows 7 computer I couldn’t get my computer to recognize the drive, so for the next 11 hours I tried to get it to work. On top of that I couldn’t get a display output from my gpu, so I eventually took my old computers dvd drive, connected the sata cable from it into my motherboard and the power supply from my grandparents build because my psu hadn’t come yet, and used the windows 10 installation dvd that was for their parts, an old nvidia 9300 from my moms 10 year old pc so I could get display output and was finally able to get windows 10 installed on both computers. Was able to build their computer no problems but my pc wasn’t so fortunate... after I built my computer and had it connected to the tv for a couple days ( I hadn’t bought my computer monitor yet ) I went out of town for 2 weeks. When I got home I  moved the pc into my room, hooked everything up pressed the power button... and Nothing, that started 2 weeks of trouble shooting. At first I thought it was a bad 24 pin eps connector, because when the evga power supply works it has a solid green light in the back. And when that cable was unplugged the light came on instead of flashing, so I got one sent to me under warranty ( props to EVGA for great customer support ) the new cable arrived and still nothing. That’s when I started to panic a little bit 😅, and when I was putting in the new eps cable my cablemod 24 pin extension cable broke as well another return 🙄 but Amazon was pretty good about it so that was no problem. Over the next couple days me and my dad tried to figure out what was wrong. We narrowed it down to a grounding issue so one night I took the whole computer apart set the stuff on the box and it finally worked. I spent the next 5 hours taking a nail file and sanding the paint off the back of the motherboard screws reassembling the computer and it STILL didn’t work, so I replugged in every cable that I thought was important, and nothing, I decided to check the fans and rgb... turns out a backwards rgb cable kept my pc from running for almost 3 weeks.                The second story is one of my friends builds, I had been helping him pick out parts for the past several weeks. When he got all the parts he had another one of his friends help him build the computer, a day later he video calls me asking him to help him configure his hard drive (because it wasn’t showing up in bios or anything ) turns out when his friend was building his pc, in the rats nest of cable management, he forgot to plug in sata power to the hard drive, an easy fix but kind of funny.           And the last story. Just recently I helped a friend of mine with  his first pc build, and I walked him through it over several video calls. There was some confusion in the end with his gpu. First was he didn’t have the gpu screws out of the pcie slot cover so the gpu was just wedged in the case, the fingers on the back of the gpu weren’t even in the slots either, just a couple degrees from breaking the pcb and destroying the gpu entirely, so when I told him to remove the screws from the back of the gpu slot cover he thought that  I meant the gpu backplate and took that off accidentally, after he got it assembled it wouldn’t post, and the gpu fans wouldn’t spin meaning it wasn’t getting power, so after about 2 hours of unplugging and replugging cables and stuff in, we called it a night, the next day he de- and re-assembled the computer and it finally worked. But I’ve had some “fun” troubleshooting computers now. But I still love it and can’t wait to see what the next generations of pcs can do

Waffler

My horror story is actually the whole reason why I got into the PC building hobby. It was back in 1999, I had bought a Dell computer for myself for gaming and such. One day, I ran into BSOD. At the time, I was pretty clueless about computers, so I called Dell Tech Support.

First, a little background about me before I go on to give you better context of my experience. I'm completely deaf in my left ear and severely hard-of-hearing in my right ear, in which I wear a hearing aid. I can speak on the phone and, most of the time, get by OK. Not this time...read on.

I get a guy with a heavy accent and speaking somewhat broken English. For a guy like me with hearing loss, this was a bad omen. I kindly asked if I could be transferred to someone who could speak more clearly and, frankly, a more American cadence. I want to emphasize that this ISN'T prejudice at work but the laws of physics (sound) and my ears' inability to process sound. As a result, much of what is said to me either sounds like underwater noise or different words (I'm a walking homonym dictionary). Of course, the guy was doing his best to be kind and offer his help, despite my repeated and desperate pleas to transfer me. (Side note, I had called a few times prior to this with similar results and gave up on trying to get lucky with someone who could speak better for me).

Resigned, I explained my problem and, to his credit, did the best he could to walk me through diagnosing and solving. The entire call took FOUR hours, with him sometimes literally spelling words out for me (and even his LETTERS sounded like other letters to me!). We eventually resolved the problem, but after that, I swore I was never going to call tech support again and just learn it on my own. That's how I figured out how easy PC building is when I installed more RAM for the first time. I give a lot of credit to that guy for being patient with me, but my patience ran out several times.

If only more businesses back then were more sensitive to needs like mine like they are now (better late than never, I suppose), but then I'd never have gotten into PC building!