I'm just curious; I have built hundreds of high-end systems, and it wasn't until very recently that I felt like giving it up. Has anyone else had luck as bad as I did on this project? About three months ago I had a client want a D830 system with SLI 7900 GT's. Okay, fine. I shared with him the pro's and con's of the various components, we compromised, and I started ordering the parts. Generally, I give clients a 5-day turnaround. This would turn out to be a bad decision. The first problems began when both the BFG GeForce 7900 GT's arrived. The retail box was prestine, however the plastic inner holding box was a bit roughed up. Both of these cards would be found to have missing/broken away surface joined capacitors. Fine, RMA them and add one week. Next came the Raptor 150GB gaming hard drive. It began fine, but about an hour into loading the O/S it locked solid (onfirmed via see-through window). Fine, contact WD and get a replacement. Add two weeks. Then once the next set of BFG GeForce 7900 GT's arrived, to my very surprise, the exact same problem was seen: capacitors rolling around inside a perfect retail box. F*ing fine! Research the card and find that I am with the majority on the problem. RMA, substiture eVGA card instead. Next came the motherboard. It uses Realtek's High Definition Audio. Unfortunatly, only the latest driver from Realtek (whom I must add has realeased six driver revisions for their hardware from the start of this project to the end of the entire nightmare one month later) will keep this system from seeing BSOD's. Finally, I get the WD Raptor in and all looks well. The eVGA 7900 GT's are in and look good. The system has a solid O/S and has been overclocked to 3.6GHz without additional voltage or cooling. It's even running the DDR2 at 800MHz without a problem. Then, without any warning, during an hour of FEAR demo testing the 600w power supply goes up in smoke. I swear, getting a deposit on this system was the only thing that went right. Thankfully the client was understanding (but only believed me after I showed him all of the RMA forms and smoked PSU). Share your horror stories.
not much ... hmm .. my hard disk came one week later than the rest of my components.. ... then my motherboard has some "bug" where the clock reset after disconnecting from the wall .. rma it after a year & got a replacement board .. waited for one month for it but luckily the shop is kind to borrow me a brand new board which is almost similar to my current board.. no there is no need of reinstalling windows
Damn man, that's a pretty bad run of luck. My worst experience so far was killing a 6600GT, screwing up a motherboard and discovering that one of my CPUs was dead, all in the space of about 1 week. I was just about ready to sell everything and use a PIII
My worst luck was blowing up my cheapo 300W PSU about 5 years back, blowing the processor, motherboard, CDROM drive, 2 HDD, sound card, network card. I can't remember what else was broken, I think this is bad enough. I had some shitty luck with graphics card too. 2 R9500 broke for different reasons, broke a Voodoo2 while trying to SLI to different brands...
wow..dats bad run of bad luck *phew* never hav really badluck building a system..but only once building a cheap pc for my cousin..went to shop all the stuff back home discover the psu is 20pin rather than 24pin..ahh..lazy go back jus try my luck..plug it n work brilliantly dun care after tat..jus send to my cousin..anything wrong i would jus say bad psu n less money gave me buying a good psu
the bloody lousy idiotic icute psu burnt my hdd... i saw spark n smoke coming out fr my hdd b4 the whole system auto power off...
Whoa! Such terrible coincidences! Cheap 350W PSU burned and with it, a Gigabyte motherboard. But I was at least lucky enough that it didn't burn the CPU.
good 4 u.. & i forgot to mention that 1 day, when my dad was using the pc (hdd replaced), that stupid psu EXPLODED with a loud bang... he said he saw some white smoke & got freaked out... but luckily it suicided without killing any other components...
I think mine was a Abit NF7-S that was DOA. I spent a few hours trying to get it to work. It would sometimes boot but wouldn't at other times and I couldn't install windows on it. After a while, it quit out on me. EDIT: typo
Power surge took out everything once. Was fun.. it was a clear, bright, sunny day, and then the whole room suddenly lit up, there was this huge *zap* and everything turned off. The entire inside of the plug was burned crispy. Cousin had a hard disk blow up in his hand once.
lightning strike killed my astech adsl router...sent for RMA (hehe) and bought a new one so i don't experience downtime. my first LCD had a dead pixel, didn't realise until after the first week of using it...and less than a year later, it started giving problems, not able to switch on. RMA it and still waiting for it to come back (1 month already).
My X1800XL started artifacting slightly after two/three months using it and the card refused to overclock as it was before. The card artifacts soooo slightly (very hard to notice) that I had to....... kill it for RMA I'm so evil
Not actually building a system but one 3.2GB hdd of my first ever PC died suddenly, taking everything with it. Didn't even say goodbye. I had a hand in sending him to heaven, it fell from a box, about 5 cm high. About 1/2 year ago, I bought my most expensive graphics card, the 6800GT. Died on me after about 2 months. RMA for about 1 month, then died again after a week I got it back from RMA. Now, after the 2nd round of RMA. It's with Chai now. Hopefully when I get it back, it won't go again. In total, I only play with it for 3 months. Sigh... I wish I waited and got the 7800GS.
Last year, I accidentally threw 2 pair of brand new DDR RAM (4 modules) away. I only had them for like 30mins (paid at shop, took it back home, and .. ). I was cleaning my room after opening up all my new stuff. didn't realise the RAM was still in one of these big plastic bags which i later used to collect all the useless manual, boxes and rubbish. worst experience ever.
lucky so far? but man, thats why i buy from newegg, AFTER reading all the customer feedback stuff. alot of shipping problems happen during bulk shipping from the manufacturers. when the stack in the warehouses. not too long ago i spilled mountain dew all over a brand new evga k8-nf47, recovered it by soaking it in a bathtub and drying it with a hairdryer, works fine.
I remember once when it was possible to do that, I plugged the power cables into the mainboard the wrong way around. Talk about instant death.
When I hot-flash my BIOS, I accidently put the chip in the wrong way (the notch was facing the wrong way at all) and when I try to flash it with Uniflash - it didn't move at all... ... until I heard quite a loud pop... and there's a black hole on the chip, and I realized that I have already killed my good old Asus VX-97...
