How to kill a T-Bred B........A major goof

First, let me state that i have no intentions of turning anyone away from O/Cing their system to the max and then some, but i'm not going to burn another CPU by clocking it 1,000Mhz faster than rated speed, unless i'm absolutely sure of the cooling efficiency.
It all started when i wanted to build a waterblock, and my son wanted one for his rig, which is a duron 1100. I built the prototype, made some revisions, and installed it. it had been running fine at 2353Mhz, 2.025 Vcore, rock-solid on prime95.
Then i got the crazy idea to get a new case, and swap everything over into the new case, including the waterblock setup. My biggest mistake was to not finish what i started when i had the chance.
My son, who is a naive at computers as a snail is to math, decided to try and finish the job, using a copper block heatsink and fan until i got home to finish it. His biggest mistake was to put the HS+F on backwards and no thermal paste (oops). not to mention the massive O/C and Vcore overload.
What he said happened was a little cloud of smoke puffed out of the side of the case, a quiet hiss sound, and a blank screen.
Naturally he was baffled. He had not seen or heard a CPU go "POOF" before. He then proceeded to O/C his CPU by about 400Mhz and .2 Vcore on his stock (read "small" and "cheap" in the dictionary)HS+F. again, no thermal paste, just the factory heat pad material. 3 minutes later, the screen went blank, and "POOF", his duron craps out.
Moral of the story?.........
Mama's, dont let your babies grow up to burn CPUs. My son is so afraid of ruining the new 2500 barton i got today, he won't even get on the web........

Poor kid, he didn't have a chance.

I've killed a few. Heatsink 180 degrees off so that it was resting on the cam box. Huh, it'll start to load Windows, then lock up. What's that smell?

No deaths in the computer family in quite a while though, and I hope it stays that way.

Reassure your son that he is not alone. Many of us have done as bad and worse.

just a thought. maybe next time you should go through the step by steps with your son.. if he's old enough to put on the heatsink by himself.. then he's prob old enough to learn how to do it properly...

nothing trying to bash you or anything.. and it does suck to burn a cpu =|

My first fry was an AMD DX-4 133MHz. It didn't have a notch, and I stuck it in wrong. God, I can still remember the smell. Ummm.. what else have I trashed... a couple K6-2's, my Palomino 1900+: heatsink wasn't mounted properly, it just popped when it was turned on...I've had my few run ins... not as bad as when I fried myself, I mean my power supply by leaving its cover off and accidentally discharging a capacitor through me into the motherboard... YOUCH.. that hurt.

Be aware of wtf you're doing.

-Frank

Well, the fact that he is only eleven years old, and has already built his own computer from scratch says enough about his willingness to learn, i just haven't had time to teach him the proper way to mount a heatsink.
Everything else, he's learned from watching me.
Is this an indicator of whats to come from our young ones?
That they may be building our "nitrogen time capsules" and creating things we haven't even thought of yet is mind boggling enough for a parent to consider our children the next Einstein, or Bill Gates (i know that name is a four-letter word to some).
I was the same way when i was a child. Always experimenting, always truying to get the last drop of performance out of anything i touched, so i guess it runs in the family, (I'm just waiting to see what the 8 year old is going to do).

every overclocker (at one time or another) have fried or will fry a processor or three over time, don't let him get too down or discouraged over it.

he really built his first comp at 11? most impressive

I built my first one at 11 too!!

hehe the sooner the better ;d back when i was 11 i didnt have this kinda stuff to play with ;d

Hey, I built mine at 11 too. I also remebr the first time I shorted an alarm clock. We had had just moved into our new house and I was 5 yrs old. My mom gave me this old alarm clock to take apart. I remeber opening it up and seeing four wires... I took them off and put then on in a diffent order. Then, thinking I had fixed the clock, plugged it in. I remember this huge a$$ spark coming out of wall socket. That scared me half to death. Also tripped the circut breaker.

Another time, 2yrs ago, My friend and got in trouble in PE. We were told to sit next to the wall for the rest of the class period. Luckyfor us, we sat next to a loose outlet. My friend started dropping the metal part of gum wrappers behind the outlet. A few minutes a later, one of tthem connected. A blue FLAME shot out the wall for about a second. We both jumped back. Then my PE teacher who saw it out the corner of his eye walked over and tapped the outlet. It sparked again, but wasn't as bad. Before he could yell at us, the bell rang. Talk about saved by the bell!
BTW, there is still a scorch mark on the wall

i changed my first ram chips at 11, thought i was a god

My dad has built his computers for as long as I can remember so I have always been around them. For my 9th birthday present, all he gave me was a motherboard, cpu, ram, and all the other parts and said have fun. So I built my first computer at the age of 9 . Its funny to see though that most people don't have the slightest idea on how to put a computer together, but its just like a first language to all of us.

when I was about 12 my mom bought 64 MB of edo ram for our 120 pentium pro compaq, at the time that much ram was insane, equivalent to 2Gb of ram today. Of course she didn't understand the picture so I ended up doing it. I put my first comp together at around 13, it was a amd 450 k6/2. I also fried a 2100+ palomino when I screwed up trying to unlock it (can't unlock a 2100 easily). I've done plenty of interesting things with electricity, one of which I built a 400 volt water electrolysis contraption (i actually built the power source from a transformer, capacitor, and diodes. . . very dangerous). I could generate about 1 liter of hydrogen every 15 minutes of course I have done the gum wrapper thing, works best with outlets connected to switches, put the wrapper into both slots, flick the switch I just like messing with electricity and computers

P.S. I just recieved my acceptance letter to Michigan Technological University, just telling the world, my number 1 college

I built my first one when I was 9 (64 mb edo ram was close to the best back then ). It had an AMD K6-2 233 with an S3 Virge video card, Sound Blaster 16, and 64 mb of edo ram. I still have it today as a symbol of my computer making days! I guess I'll be doing this forever (but only with AMD ).

Just for kicks, I still have my old 8Mhz IBM PS2 model 20 in my bedroom, with MS Windows version 1.1 (yes, there was windows back then, just really hard to get the mouse to work with it), and MS Dos 5.0 for an OS. It has a total of 2MB of ram, and a 20MB hard drive (huge back in 1987), with the original 8512 monitor.
I used it for school work and some programming in C+, which was the pinnacle of gaming back then, but mostly for school work.
I bet i still have my homework in it from like 1990.
Yes, my son did build his own computer, but its not his first venture into electronics and computing. He actually corrected a corrupt hard drive on my old hewlett-packard 7100. That was when he was only 6 yrs old! (talk about a smart cookie).

I have total empathy for your son. Ive been around computers since I was three. I can still remember my dad bringing home an old packard bell 386 with 4 megs of ram back when that was considered faster then a porsche on nitrious pumped up with a few shots of steroids. I've been building computers and overclocking for years now and I finally fried my first CPU. Now Im afraid to even try this home made water cooling system I just built (after spending 40 dollars a while ago to have a machinest make a water block for me). Pat him on the back and get him an old CPU to fry and screw around with so that he doesnt have to worry bout killing it. You've got a smart kid. Let him loose.

heh i took my parents printer apart and put it back together when i was 5. been doing stuff with computers and electicity since. Made a Jacobs ladder from pretty much scratch when i was 8. I still have the scar . I've fried 1 MP2000+ and 1 XP 1700 so far since i started overclocking. You never forget the smell thats for sure.

question, wtf is a jacobs ladder, other then a great movie and book?

The jacobs ladder is that device that looks like a TV antenna, but eletricity arcs back and forth. The ScreenSavers built one

oh right, tesla looking thing you see in all the 50's movies about mad scientists. thank you !

cheers