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Ever burn out somthing? Negligance, user error, or other? What was it?

VirtualLarry

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
I've burned out a cheapo "Deer" PSU, and an Abit BX6-r2 Slot1 motherboard, due to error on my part wiring up a slotket adaptor for a Tualatin mod. Can't really recall burning anything else out.

The PSU might have been because of negligance, I had replaced the fan, and wired the fan connector outside of the PSU, and I might have forgotten to plug it in when I moved things around in my case. That was back in my Pentium/PII days. I use much better PSUs now in my own rigs.

Edit: My bad, I forgot, I burned out a 9600GSO video card, in my F@H rig. It got up to 92C, and was running there for two weeks. I don't know if that counts as negligance or not, the cooler was pretty crappy, and the card wouldn't allow fan control via RivaTuner, otherwise I would have cranked it up. It was an Asus card, with their honking big two-slot fan, but with two of those cards next to each other, there's very little room for airflow. Currently, my F@H rig has four 9600GSOs running happily next to each other, but they are all single-slot cards now, so there's plenty of airflow. This was in an Antec 300 case, with plenty of fans, all on high.

I think I also burned out some Corsair XMS DDR2 1GB sticks, and some Crucial Ballistix Tracers sticks. I count that under "other", because I don't think I did anything to burn them out, I didn't overvolt them.
 
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Back in the CRT days... my dad randomly decided he was gonna stick a sticker onto the desktop case (cheap and old POS case). He wiped the spot with a towel first, and somehow, that caused the CRT monitor to flicker off and we started smelling something burning.... Turns out that the monitor still works, but the image displayed was heavily distorted.

I've had a few other things die on me, but I don't think they burned or anything.
 
Yes, one time a while back go I changed the PSU red switch in the back for Europe or America, I changed it to 225 and sh*T blew up! 🙁 It toasted HD floppy cd drive and itself LOL
 
Burned out a stick of DDR266 and my KT266A mobo because I didn't have the DIMM fully inserted into the slot. Gave me a nice excuse to upgrade to a Winchester A64 3000+ and an Epox (anybody remember them?) 9NDA3J.
 
Forgot to lift the lever on the AM3 CPU socket and bent the Athlon II X4 pins on my first build. Newegg was very good to me and sent me another on the free. I'll never make that mistake again, and hadn't on my last two. Oh, btw, I'm still not completely positive the lack of putting the lever up was to blame. There were molding errors in the socket and some of the holes had some shreads of plastic. I'll continue to look for that as well!
 
My uncle's computer in Asia. Forgot about setting the right voltage on the psu and little mushroom of smoke came out of the pc. Can't believe no one noticed though.
 
Managed to plug in the power cable on a floppy drive upside-down. There was smoke. . . :-O
 
First thing I roasted was a brand new AMD 1600+ chip .. freakin' in a hurry and mounted the heatsink backwards on the socket. What .. an idiot !!

Next on the fried hardware list was my first attempt at molex dyeing, and I was fully customizing this PC to have black molex tips. Bad news was, I did not plug the pins in using the proper order, and fried a pair of CD/RW burners 🙁

Currently, my F@H rig has four 9600GSOs running happily next to each other,
Click to expand...
Its been a year and a half since I last asked, but I am patiently awaiting pics of this setup Larry !
 
1) Slid a Colorado Memory Systems tape drive with exposed PCB into a case while everything was powered up. The PCB rubbed on the metal cover of a disk drive below it and destroyed the tape drive.

2) Offset a floppy disk power connector by one pin, shorting the power supply directly to ground. It melted the power lead but didn't damage anything else.

3) Replaced a failed motherboard with another one, not realizing that the power supply had failed. Result: TWO failed motherboards. That was around the time that I decided to stop buying $15 ATX power supplies.
 
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Burned out a 486 Dx2 66Mhz. I put it in the socket the wrong way round.

Comp wouldn't boot and there was a burning smell. The CPU had melted into the socket (it only had a tiny passive heatsink). After a lot of prying with a screwdriver, it came out. The CPU socket was scorched and charred around the power pins.
 
I burned out the replacement MB and the memory in a crappy e-machines PC while working on it in a case with (not obvious) shorting problems. That was working for Firedog at Circuit City in a highly distracting environment too :0

I've had other customers at other businesses whose PSUs smoked out, cd-rom drives that would constantly open and close on their own, and CRT monitors fried all on my watch but at no fault of my own.
 
My wife burned my old 8800 GTX I handed down to her. The card was clogged with dust which caused it to overheat.
 
I hooked up a USB header wrong, and burned out a digital camera, and 2 MP3 players before I figured out what the problem was. Curiously, flash drives worked fine in that port 😵
 
When I first built a computer 8 years ago I bought an athlon xp 3000+ but I got it OEM. Didn't think I needed a heatsink so I tried to boot it up with no cooling at all. That didn't end well.
 
I don't know how but i was moving my rig and monitor from one corner of the room to the other. I unplugged the VGA cable from the MSI GF6600 and moved the whole case. When i moved the monitor ang tried to plug the VGA cable into the VGA slot there was a tiny spark (could see it cause it was a bit dark). The nice GF6600 didn't work after that. It's still confusing me what did that since i unplug and plug VGA cables all the time with no problems.

A year back i bought a brand new ThinkPad (i think it was the R400) for a friend. The transparent sticker over the HDD activity, num lock, caps lock leds was i a bit loose so i took a super glue in order to glue it up. In all my wisdom i tried to put as little glue as possible but i heard a loud glass crashing sound from the other room (my wife) and freaked out for a milisecond. When i turned back my head towards the screen i noticed a super glue drops all over the screen.... Damn i was furious. I almost ripped my hair off my scalp.... My friend just said: "You stupid idiot" (in Macedonian) and took the laptop happily. He says he has no problems with his new "screen acne" . Oh and the screen was matte 😀
 
RebateMonger said:
3) Replaced a failed motherboard with another one, not realizing that the power supply had failed. Result: TWO failed motherboards. That was around the time that I decided to stop buying $15 ATX power supplies.
Click to expand...

I've done this. Also:

- Somehow managed to mount DDR backwards. Would not boot, started burning. Label on the dimm caught on fire for a second.
 
Speaking of backwards memory, you reminded me of when I was young and didn't know what I was doing. Put in a stick of SDRAM backwards (32MB PC-66 as I recall). It didn't latch quite right, but I didn't notice...

Powered on. . . there was smoke. Powered off, turned it the right way around. It worked. . . and continued to work ever after. . . never did understand that.
 
Pretty sure I damaged my old Gigabyte board's northbridge. It ended up freaking out whenever I tried to enable CrossFire.
 
In the 486 days, I mistook a floppy power connector for one of the old style CD-audio connectors. Nuked one unfortunate generic ISA soundcard.
 
I set my first computer on fire.

I was gifted a lovely HP Pavilion desktop which was the bought at a very affordable price of over $2000. It was a pentium w\ a 2gb hard drive, and 128mb ram.

Knowing absolutely nothing about computer hardware at the time, I bought an AMD cpu from ebay. ( Yes... been using ebay since I was 14-15 )

I installed the cpu, and turned the power on. I had to goto the bathroom, so walked across the hall and began using the restroom when the overpowering smell of burning circuit board hit my nostrils.

I quickly turned around and the computer was ON FIRE. Luckily nothing else caught fire and the fire went out easily.

If you think this description is long...well, the above troubleshooting took even longer.
 
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