Stupid Things You Have Done With Your Computer...

Originally Posted by Magic

Last year I was looking into making my computer quieter, and ended up buying a somewhat unusual fan/heatsink for my CPU. The stupid part of this was that I decided to do it in the middle of the school semester when I really couldn't really afford break my computer (or mess with it at all for that matter).

Incidentally, my stupid computer-killing story starts in the exact same way. I was using the stock AMD heatsink and one generic fan, and the combination was noisy and bad at keeping things acceptably cool in summer.

I bought an Arctic Cooling heatsink and some nice temperature controlled fans, and a tube of Arctic Silver to install the heatsink with. The heatsink and fans went on perfectly, worked perfectly, and all was well...until I had the bright idea that I could improve the system's cooling further by using some of the leftover Arctic Silver on the bottom of the chipset heatsink. In the process of removing or reinstalling the cooler, I managed to break a trace on the (rather expensive, BTW) motherboard, which killed it completely.

That board was replaced with an el-cheapo ECS, which actually went perfectly well until I killed it in another over-enthusiastic burst of noise reduction. Suffice it to say that you should not disconnect the chipset fan from a motherboard if it comes with one. I can't say for sure that disconnecting the chipset fan was what killed it, especially since $40 ECS boards aren't exactly the most reliable things ever made, but it definitely started to go downhill after I did that, and by the time I made the mental connection and hooked it back up, the board was already nearly-useless.

my third motherboard was an MSI with a passive cooler, and I'm not touching it with a ten-foot pole. o_o

Jam it back in, in the dark.