How many pieces of hardware have you fried?

[General Septem]

So let's hear it, motherboards, GPUs, CPUs, RAM, hard drives - how many computer parts have gotten fried or in any other way bricked because of something you've done? Feel free to share any stories you might have.

 

My vote is three, but I don't know if it was anything I did for the first two. I had two 7950GTs fry on me one after the other after I'd installed my HR-03 on each. I don't know if this was the cause, but the first one seemed to be working before I swapped the cooler. Once I did, it stopped working, and I was lucky enough to get an RMA replacement from the Egg. I installed the HR-03 on the second one without even testing it with the stock cooler first, and it shut down my PC after just 15 seconds. I pressed the power button again, and all of a sudden one of the MOSFETs burst into flames with a big pop. I was lucky enough again to receive an RMA refund from NewEgg, and they even refunded my 15% restocking fee.

 

I don't know if it was anything I'd done to cause these two, but the third was almost certainly something I did - I opened a 40 GB PATA HDD and then closed it back up again, and then it didn't work. I was going to replace the top with a clear top, but I didn't take any precautions and I let it sit around with the top off in the anti-static bag with saran wrap over it for a while.

[ReelFiles]

3 things I killed;

 

1.)

I was gonna do a file transfer from one machine to another, but my router was acting up. So I found this old butt 20GB IDE hard drive that was sitting around for at lest 5 years. Well half way into the 3, ca 5GB files, I noticed my case lighting up. Sure enough, when I peeked through the side window there was a flame shooting out the bottom of the hard drive's PCB. The flame was about 2 inches long and was funky colored like when you heat up copper. Scary but pretty cool too.

 

2.)

I broke a capacitor off in my CoolerMaster Aquagate that was responsible of the overheat shutdown/alarm feature, that almost ended badly, but I caught it in time.

 

3.)

My 9600XT AGP card stopped working one day, I think it either got shorted out or static electricity got it, but I am leaning towards the latter.

 

Sure I killed more stuff, but I don't remember.

[kitfit1]

Two acts of stupidity here.

 

1)Fried my Mobile XP2600 socket A. The plan was to try and get it in the GGG club(the only socket A)under phase. Anyway it put up stiff resistance, so i resorted to 2+ volts through it :eek2:. It did'nt resist anymore, just fizzled and died :sad:

 

2)killed my first NF2 Infinity with a Vdimm mod(well these things happen )

 

I allways wonder why we do stupid things some times :confused:

[UncleDavid218]

None, which is actually surprising

[Splave]

8800gts 640mb, thanks evga for the RMA

[Nightwish68]

Three.

2 times asus A7v266 mobo in a period of a few months, that was in the begining of my 'I build my own rig days'

 

The last one was aboy 2 years ago, a brand new PSU, i think is was a faulty one.

As i powered the rig on the PSU sparked and smoked.:eek:

Lucky me that nothing else was fried.

[Voltes-5]

Three that I can remember, but there had been more.

 

1) Asus P4C800E Dlx I wanted to push my Prescott to 4GHz, wich I did with the

Asus fully volt modded. After testing 3.9 or something with Prime for 8 hrs I

ran the 4GHz and it started out cool for a while then rebooted. I used for the

night then the next day it just fried while running prime.

 

2) An Opty 165 @ 2.85 fried because the mobo tray touched the waterblock

mounting rods causing a spark and smoke, very nearly killed my PC P&C 510

ASL too.

 

3) My Antec Neo Power 480. I wanted to transfer the toggle switch

on the back of the psu to the back of LianLi htpc case because the psu

is inside the case. Mod was a success till one of the bare wires touched

the heatsinks on the open psu and zzzzzzzt, my wife told me the next day

she was suppressing a laugh because the words that came out of my

mouth were "ohh f*&%, I killed it". Oh, did I mention I was nearly done

with a bottle of Merlot at 3 AM when I did the mod?

[Guest r3d c0m3t]

Let's see here...the things I've fried are as follows:

 

My old Radeon 9250 AGP - I shorted out one of the solder contact points with my finger (static) the screen went blank, a bunch of colors came up and a few seconds later I smelt something burning.

 

Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe - Pushed my 3500+ too far on it's default multiplier and when I was testing for stability it basically just shut off and when I turned it back on there was no POST screen to be seen. I cleared the CMOS...still nothing. I figured I fried my BIOS in the process. :tooth:

 

I fried my 7800GS, too. It was a volt-mod gone horribly wrong.

 

These are all I can remember right now.

[red930]

Guess I'm the 'winner' so far with 6...

 

2x DFI Infinity 975X/G boards - SATA controller burned on the first, the second I'm still not sure on, hoping a new BIOS chip fixes whatever the problem is but I'm too lazy to order one and the board sits here dead as all hell.

 

2x kits (well, one stick of each kit) of Mushkin Redline CH-5 - as good as they were I kept just pumping more volts into them.

 

Corsair 2x512 DDR2-800 5-5-5-15 - nice and cheap, again fun to put volts through. This time I'm not sure what happened, wasn't overclocking them, they just stopped working (not using the Inifinity here either, originally used for an Abit NF-M2, tried it in the RD600 as well)

 

Intel C2D E6700 - dunno what happened to it, worked fine then didn't work. I suspect it's due to an improper heatsink mount but I really don't know - looked good when I pulled it off. Never used the heatsink again. (Swiftech MCX something or other, looked real nice on paper. Which is good, because now its a $50 paperweight.)

 

I'm sure there's more, the 6800GT OC could count but I might be able to fix it, so here's hoping for no number 7...

[Branjo]

Just one, One of my awesome OKIA PSU's went pop just last week after a mild OC.

[AnUnknownSource]

Well, overseas the AC is 220v instead of 110v, in the years before auto switching power supplies were commonplace I fried at least 6 or 7 just by plugging the wrong cord back in, or having it switched to the wrong voltage when I got it home or whatever. Most of those were in the store I was a technician for, so were easily replaced... lol More than once they took out another part with them, a motherboard once and a cpu another time.

 

That makes 9...

 

I dropped a Hard Drive because of the disease butterus fingerus (also the name of a porn site I think...) It hit something that left a scratch on the PCB. I just called WD and gave them the error code their utility spat out and they replaced it... I didn't mention it fell... bad Llama. Didn't make up for the 80 gigs or so of personal data (not music or video, REAL data) that was lost :-(

 

That makes 10...

 

Hmmm, what else... I spilled coffee on an old school keyboard and it never worked again...

 

11...

 

I stepped on a pci network card once, after taking a potty break in the middle of a modding session... probably would have worked just as well as it had before though...

 

That's 12...

 

I'm sure I'll remember more later...

[General Septem]

If you're counting keyboards, I've fried three of those.