Anyone ever knackered their PC trying to make it faster?

[Wonga]

Weeell, I am in the questioning mood at the moment, so has anyone got any interesting stories of how they blow their PC up while trying to make it go a bit faster?

The worst thing I ever did was try to get a K6-2 400 to run in my old Socket 7 Intel TX motherboard. Well, I put the new CPU in, but it kept rebooting just after detecting the CPU, no matter what settings, voltages etc I tried. Well, "all you need to do is upgrade the BIOS!" I thought, which is where it all went wrong. Now I dunno what happened, maybe the motherboard just didn't like the BIOS update, or maybe it was corrupted when downloaded, or maybe Microstar really messed up with their web links, but after flashing the BIOS, the PC wouldn't boot or anything. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, I thought. Well, the only way to fix this (or at least that I what I thought at the time) was to buy a new motherboard, which I did, costing me £60 (£60 more than I intending on spending on this 'cheap' upgrade ). Well, the new motherboard arrived and obviously worked, but two weeks later a computer came into the little computer store that I work at on weekends and it had the exact same motherboard. Well, to cut a long story short, I took the motherboard home and hot swapped the BIOS with my knackered board (which my boss' permission of course ) and one BIOS flash later the board was working again. If only I could have done that before buying the new board...

Sooooo, that's my biggest screw up yet. Anyone think they can top it? Can't be hard, surely

 

[fury]

After hearing (and falling for) all the hype about 98 being faster, with better access to the internet and recommended by 4 out of 5 doctors (with the 5th one quickly having been arrested for immediate assimilation by the borg...er...*ahem* Microsoft), I upgraded Windows 95 on a P133 with 48 megs of ram... Boy, was it hurting after that.

I've never really killed any hardware trying to make it go faster, just brutally abused it.

 

[Wonga]

LOL! I bet the hard disk certainly got a workout. Whenever I put Win98 on a machine at work with less than 64MB RAM, I feel like apologising to the customer.

 

[Tweety]

You are lame, you are...

Hold on a moment... this will be a long list...

486 DX2/66Mhz overclocked to 100Mhz and died of overheating after 5-6 days... plastic holddowns on sink partially melted.

P75 - drowned during watercooling experiments

P90 - Reached -50 degrees celsius during experiments with watercooling and peltier, never booted again...

PII 400 - ran for 3-4 months at -10 degrees celsius untill killed by lack of isolation, resulting in condensation/ice

PIII 600 - ran for 1 year at -15 degrees celsius untill killed by a failing peltier, resulting in overheating

PIII 700 - the core cracked when the pump failed on watercoolig/peltier setup, went from -10c to +40c in a couple of minutes, and the thermal stress cracked it...

Add a couple of odd parts, all killed mostly due to abuse, wear and tear...

edit... I forgot one... duh...

 

[Tweety]

Oh... probably should add... I still have a PIII 600 running
833@-12c it's on it's second year of life at that temp...
And a PIII700@1050 -23c counting on 1,5 year...

And yes... these run mostly 24/7 more or less constantly...they go on holiday when ambient temps start exceeding 28c in summer ie soon...

 

[Wonga]

'Tweety the CPU abuser'

 

[Acid]

fury, you've cracked a 1.4ghz haven't you?

 

[fury]

Yes, my old 1.2 @ 1.4, but that had nothing to do with me trying to make it go faster. It was just too hot (and still would've been even if it was at 1.2), and the heatsink was so tight that it cracked under the pressure when it locked up and shut off.

 

[PsychoMark]

Whenever I put Win98 on a machine at work with less than 64MB RAM, I feel like apologising to the customer.

Damn, am I the only one in the world who got Windows 2000 running nicely on a P133 with 48 MB RAM? Ok, it wasn't exactly a speed monster, but it didn't crash at all, played my MP3's while programming, I was even able to play some games thanks to the Voodoo 3 (half-life got 40 FPS, at a low resolution of course, but who cares)


Anyways, I never messed up anything trying to make it faster, because I don't even try to make it faster. I did mess up my (at that time) brand new 286 when I password protected the whole system, something apparently went wrong while entering the password and I wasn't able to access it anymore. Reset jumper? They never heard of that. We even tried short-circuiting the BIOS chip and leaving the batteries out for 3 weeks, nothing helped.

Ah, that reminds me, I also murdered a P100 mobo once. I was placing it on the metal plate when I forgot that the little things in the bag were there to protect the board from touching the metal. I blamed my power supply at first, but then I noticed a large black spot on the board . Had to buy a new one (the P133 mentioned above) :S

 

[Tweety]

@Wonga

Heh... You want the Loooooong list????

I only listed CPU's coz I never had any luck overclocking anything else...

If I were to list ALL puter parts I have killed I would wear out my keyboard...

Oh... BTW add a Diamond 770 TNT2 to the list...
It didn't like being at AGP speeds above spec I guess... It died after a week or so at 89Mhz...

But you should have seen the 3dmark scores I got at 89Mhz AGP bus... no other TNT2 was even close...

(not sure about name...was a while ago...this was on my trusty old BE6-II with the PIII 600, both CPU and AGP card peltier cooled)