We love how spunky little computers are scraping together glorious DIY projects that somehow run the latest and greatest games. When I’m in a good mood, I say it’s a fun habit of my hobby. However, if everything goes wrong the first time around, you may have a failed boot and sparks flying, but that’s a right of passage, right?
In this weekend’s question, we reached out to PC Gamer staff and forums to ask about times when everything went wrong. Below you’ll find descriptions of character building disasters at the forefront of PC building.
What’s your PC-building worst disaster? Here are our answers and some from us forum (opens in new tab).
Joshua Wolens, News Writer: I cleaned the CPU with a coffee machine descaler. No further questions will be accepted at this time. thank you.
Okay then.See, in my incredibly complicated personal filing system that you don’t understand and Lined up are my plain white bottles of mystical liquid that removes limescale from coffee machines. in harmony. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but I happened to be installing a new CPU cooler in my machine one night in a daze, and I got the wrong one.
“I quickly realized how odd it was that the thermal paste was really hard to scrape off” or “never did I fail to notice that the liquid wasn’t evaporating so quickly.” I want to say something like I’m used to it,” but you’d be lying. I scraped the chip off thoroughly and replaced the cooler, only to realize something was wrong when the system failed to boot. I realized my mistake.
But in the end it doesn’t hurt.Remove the cooler, take out the CPU, majestic Karakuri The purpose was to tilt the hair dryer towards the chip socket for 25-35 minutes. Then I put everything back together and the machine came to life, cooler and no more limescale.
Those bottles still line up next to my kitchen cabinets.
Andy Chalk, News Lead: I’ve been lucky enough not to run into any major hardware catastrophes in all my years of playing on PC. I think the biggest headache I encountered was his BIOS flash that failed. A lot of time has passed and the details are faded and lost, but in the days of Duron and Celeron we were crazy about overclocking. One day I bricked a motherboard while nonchalantly messing around with forces I didn’t fully understand. .
This was the pre-Amazon era (they existed, but they weren’t the giants they are today) and I live in a small town, so the only option for replacement is a few days for some I had to wait… I contacted a random online hardware dealer and had one shipped to me, or an hour’s drive (one way!) to the nearest retailer. There was a lot of bad language and I couldn’t afford to pay for it, but I’m sure I learned a valuable lesson.
Robert Jones, Print Editor: Many years ago, while in college, I had a summer job building PCs. This job has given me a good education in the noble art of rig building. So I haven’t actually broken a PC or component while building (fingers kept crossed). !). However, we fried a lot of the components by overclocking. I’ve destroyed GPUs, RAM, motherboards, and numerous of his PSUs over the years. So it’s like going from a perfectly working PC to a case of burnt-out silicon bricks with the desire for a little extra. The frame is really tight.
Fortunately, most overclocking today is much easier and safer thanks to the right software and BIOS options. Plus, I honestly don’t think even today’s most demanding AAA games need overclocking anymore unless they’re released as an unoptimized mess. (opens in new tab)that is the way It’s behind the latest in PC gaming hardware, so you don’t have to remove the case door to run your system just to play.
Jorge Jimenez, Hardware Writer: Diablo 2 melted my first PC. As a kid, one summer when I played too much Diablo 2, my PC case one of his fans failed, causing it to overheat and shut down. I didn’t have the money to replace the fans, so I ripped them off and replaced them with small desk fans I had stolen from my dad’s office, clipped them to the top of my PC case, and blew air into the openings. I didn’t know anything about proper airflow, did you know? done!
So for about a month. I didn’t realize I was having other problems trying to run some pretty demanding PC games on a PC that didn’t meet any of the minimum requirements. The PC basically died of wear and tear. If I were a doctor, I would be sued for illegal PC gaming.
Tyler Wild, Editor-in-Chief: My CPU started overheating while reviewing Sea of Thieves (opens in new tab)After some frantic research, including putting my ear next to the CPU to hear the problem, I concluded that the closed-loop liquid cooler’s pump was failing. I ran to a computer parts store (they still exist!) and bought the same cooler. Maybe a year later: dead pump. Everyone’s experience with AIO liquid coolers may be different, but my CPU is ready to give up the ghost after boiling down in standing water, so ditch it and go with her big-ass Noctua heatsink and built a new PC with dual fans. I never looked back.
Dave James, Hardware Lead: My first PC build was the least catastrophic, but the most problematic. I was still a kid when my brother and I set out to build his PC from the parts we could find. This was back in the days when jumper switches on motherboards determined clock speeds and Cyrix Intel CPU analogues were used. I spent quite a few years bugfixing that machine and never liked it.
But years later, I had someone I loved. While working on PC Gamer’s predecessor, the PC Format, my main rig evolved into a monster with a Twin Titan GPU. The first brushed-aluminum beauty was a glorious card back in the days when GPUs were big bucks at $700.
Feeling arrogant, I decided to upgrade to a new, larger, slightly prettier chassis. I’ve built countless PCs from scratch without any problems, but this time, for reasons unknown, when I flip the power switch at the end of the build, Titan pops out one, bubbling up and emitting a terrible pungent fumes. I spat it out.
It was nothing more than a Titanic paperweight for no good reason other than a useless aesthetic.
Wes Fenron, Senior Editor: Back when PC Gamer still had a big office in San Francisco, there were always enough parts lying around to build a PC or three, so you could build one on a whim for a Friday afternoon treat. there was. I’m sure most of us in the office at some point were working on a PC I built, which usually worked just fine. But one afternoon I was able to assemble the system in about 45 minutes. I was pretty happy with how fast I was until I hit the power button and nothing happened.
Over the next hour and a half I checked all cables, swapped RAM and boot SSDs, graphics cards, power supplies, nothing worked. Finally, I removed the motherboard, removed the CPU, put it on another board, and it booted fine. ASRock’s motherboard arrived in pristine condition, fresh out of the box. Don’t think ASRock will ever forgive you for letting every component of your rig be checked in vain.
Morgan Park, Staff Writer: In short. My partner has ordered a new power supply for her little Dell machine. The whole thing seemed a little sketchy because the proper Dell PSU name is just numbers and letters and she wasn’t 100% sure it was the right one. When I plugged it in, everything started sparking and smoking, igniting the GPU. I hurriedly carried it out into the courtyard. mission failed.
from us forum (opens in new tab)
Brian Boll: I’ve only had a few boom-boom experiences with the same components about 20 years ago.
If you built a PC back then, you’ve probably heard of the infamous capacitor explosion. (opens in new tab)I hadn’t heard of it until the motherboards in both PCs boomed and in one event the HDDs were ejected as well.
I quickly learned the benefits of using Japanese capacitors in my components. As far as I know, all the unexploded ordnance was made in China. There have been many stories of industrial espionage being involved, and someone stole the imperfect formula and started the debacle!
Kaamos_Llama: I have a few, but one is less catastrophe than a beginner’s mistake.
Bought second hand in the mid 2000’s Radeon X1950XTX (opens in new tab) I turned off eBay and installed Dell XPS (opens in new tab) I had at the time. For a few weeks everything was fine. At some point I realized it wasn’t working in games and I opened the case to find that the fan was barely spinning. After a bit of searching online, I downloaded some fix that brought the card to full clock speed. At that point, the screen gave off pink and green artifacts and then went black. Funny enough, after that the card never worked again.
The second happened when we built our first system from scratch. We put it all together and proudly took pictures. It took me days to realize the PSU was upside down. The label should have been a clue. Bonus points for finding the case fan behind the HDD cage in the rear, and the front fan was wearing out as well.
Check out this beauty!
Corif: I left the adhesive tape holding the heatsink to the fan when I installed the CPU. It didn’t take me long to figure it out. That was nearly 20 years ago now. still remember
I usually have someone help me when I make it now. Last time I missed that he installed two fans for the exhaust and one for the intake. It wasn’t until we replaced the fan this year that we realized our error. It didn’t really break anything.
Alm: I seem to remember buying a motherboard not endorsed by the CPU manufacturer (AMD) in my first build about 20 years ago. And when I finally had a problem, it wasn’t on the list of recommended motherboards, so there was no support. I learned a lot in my first build.
Neo Gun Hero: Did you know that some old case fans came with two types of connectors, one that plugs directly into the motherboard and another that plugs into the power supply?
Just when I thought I was able to successfully connect, my PC wouldn’t turn on. The RGB lights were on for a few seconds before I left so it was powered on…
It turns out that I created an infinite power loop that sends power to the computer and immediately returns it. All cases because he used both connectors on the fan. Needless to say, using only one of the two of these power connectors worked for him and it booted right up.
