BAD Overclocking stories, LETS HEAR THEM!

Let's hear your overclocking stories gone bad! I will start it off...


I went insane one day and went on a 3DMark benching spree, I wanted a higher and higher score so eventually I took the stock cooling off of my Radeon 8500 and put a HUGE CPU HS on it and clocked it higher and higher till it artifacted like a mother. As high as I could get it and pass 3DMark was the goal...finally achieved a nice score then went back to the stock cooler....only to find out I had damaged the card so badly that not even stock speeds and an insane cooler would stop it from artifacting

- I gave up on 3DMark that day.....($200 loss)

Cranked a P3 800mhz CPU up as high as I could with MAX voltage for a few weeks, then the MSI board died, hehe.

- I dont give FULL voltage anymore ($120 loss)

Several times back in my Celeron 300A-400A days I corrupted a few harddrives overclocking (no PCI/AGP lock them days), no biggie just reinstall windows

- Never detered me from pushing for higher OC's. ($0 loss)

Forgot to install my freshly lapped HS on my first Athlon XP 1800+ (dont ask why) and turned that bad boy system on...POP.

- ALWAYS make sure the HS and Fan are attached before firing up in an excited rage to see a new chip perform ($0 loss, store said I could return it for another....whew!)

Those are mine off the top of my head, have had a lot of experience overclocking and cooling and building etc etc...but we all have our blonde moments and of course we kill stuff on the way

Would do it all again!

AMD Overclockes:

1) I had a old compaq with a 475 K6-2 and O/C it to 500MHz

Verdict, Hooked on overclocking,

2) Built my first computer a 1.2 Athlon with no voltage changing in the bios I could not push it above 1.45, however in my n00b days I had crappy cooling and fryed processor

Verdict, $155 loss.

3) Replaced 1.2 with 1.4 and stuck with the same mobo I could only push it to 1.6, stupidly I killed that one because I moded the HSF and went to turn the computer on and frogot the heatsink, before it could post I switched the PSU off and sorry to say it was too late and I lost that one also.

Verdict, $170 Loss

4) got a NEW Athlon Xp 1600+, Oced it to 1.65 again with stock voltage,

Verdict, got a new board with voltage changing,

5) got a AGOIA 1600+ months later and pushed it to 1.67

Verdict, Unlocked the processor and pushed it to 1.8GHz

6) Preformed a Voltmod on a new motherboard

Verdict Pushed the 1600+ to 1.92GHz

7) Bought 1700+ T-Bred "b"

Verdict, using the same board with the voltmod I cranked the 1700+ to 2.45 having a GHz Overclock from a AMD on a High end Air system.

Video Card Overclocks:

1) put Ram cooling on my GF2 and a new HSF

Verdict, and pushed the core to 260MHz

2) Bought TI4400, put ramsinks and a new HSF on it

Verdict, pushed the ram to 700MHz and the Core to 303MHz

WERD Overclocks:

Overclocked a Palm3 from 16MHz to 24MHz

INTEL Overclocks:

1) Did a job for sombody got a 866pIII form it

Verdict, came with crappy mobo a I bought a nice MSI motherboard (^) and with stock voltage pushed it to 1080, Hooked on Intel overclocking power.

2) got a 800pIII and fan it to 166FSB with a slight voltage bump.

Verdict, traded the 1600+ for a Dual Motherboard and traded the 866pIII for an other 800pIII and ran a nice dual server

3) Bought a 2.6c and a IS7,

Verdict, I'll let you know when Fedex gets here



OOPS I didnot see the "Overclocking stories Gone bad" in big BOLD red letters

Mr. $T$ said:

OOPS I didnot see the "Overclocking stories Gone bad" in big BOLD red letters [/B]

Click to expand...

Hehe, yep. But nice little history of overclocking T

Hmmm I had to think hard, but I remembered one, I spent a whole $30 Canadian on a Cyrix MII PR366 a while ago, it was rated it 250Mhz, I ran it WAYYYYY over spec at an earth shattering 266Mhz for about 18 months, and then it died!!!!!! So either due to the overclocking or the fact that the stupid mobo starts CPUs up at 3.3V before the softmenu kicks them down to the set voltage, I'm out a whole $30

I overclocked my last chip (waiting for my cooler to OC this one) and it was a 750 T-Bird and it made my room really hot.

I might just have the worst one, but let me dig up that bad P4 overclocks support group thread...

damn! looks like that thread got deleted or something...

oh well... gotta type it up again...

anyways:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Horror story 1:

I was a total n00b.

I bough RAM heatsinks and just stuck them on my brand spanking new GF3.

I overclock it, and of course it stops working.

I think it dies, so I put it inside a fridge.

Next day I order a GF3 Golden Sample.

First GF3 lives again, so i sell it off to neighbor.

GF3 Golden Sample overclocks like mad, around 20% at least on core and mem with stock cooling.

I epoxy on some ramsinks again, and of course, short out the RAM legs... so the card doesn't work again.

WHILE TRYING TO REMOVE THE RAMSINK, I RIP OFF 2 RAM MODULES! GOLDEN SAMPLE DESTROYED!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Horror story 2:

still a n00b, but pretty crazy one with a watercooled 220w peltier, and 3 days of no sleep.

Took all those 3 days to install anti condensation prevention stuff, get all the stuff hooked up.

Got Palomino 1800+ to run stable at 1867Mhz!

Got 80w watercooled peltier set up on voltmodded 8500LE!

3DMark! Go for 1st page!

****! leak!

drain out water!

5 minutes later....

****! ****! ****!!!! something smells funny!

LEFT 220W PELTIER POWER SUPPLY RUNNING!

baked: 1800+, Abit KR7A, Maze 2-1 leaks, as all the solder melted...


(a few weeks later I did manage to get halfway up 1st page of the ORB, using just aircooling. the irony...)

I found that bad P4 overclockers support group thread!
http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=231662

ive broken a transisiter off a mobo while changing a cpu.didnt hurt anything so far
i shorted out a 8rda and fried it when a vdd mod fell off.
had a satanic a7v333 that killed 2 cpu's in 2 days just by rebooting.
i did kill 2 fsp psu's after running them in parallel for 2 weeks.

ive oced alot of stuff,most high end and a few old stuff but no flames yet.i even do refer h20 and will go back to that soon im sure.

few rules of ocing:
never rush anything
never drink and oc,smoking included for me.
triple check all mods and then double check temps.
do a check list in building and even reassembling.i do mine in my head now.
read,read,read then ask questions about what you just read,especially the parts you DONT understand.
there is no guessing in ocing,unless you like dead parts.
patience saves cpu lives!

yeh im not perfect i just dont have my kids/wife living here for distractions.i also like to close my pc room door while working.

I have semi-killed a stick of RAM while being impatient with fan installation. Left the computer running (since the fan was already plugged in) and moved the fan to it's new spot. While screwing it in, it's temperature probe wires (which I had cut off for 100% speed) hit my case and everything artifacted!! NOOOOOOOO!! Hit the switch, wait 30 seconds, turn it back on, and find that everything is allright. Until Windows starts. A day later, I find that my one of my RAM sticks will no longer do over 133MHz at rated timings.


Though my favorite death story is this...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After reading through these forums on the sucesses of people voltmodding their 8500s, I decided to give it a whirl. I had NO proper equipment (voltmeter, mechanical pencil, etc.), but went after it anyway. I did the mod, and it didn't work. I did the mod again. Still didn't work. Again. Didn't work. Once more. Still refuses to work.

Now, on my 5th attempt on drawing a pencil line between a resistor's contacts, you would assume I'd give up, right? Nope. This time, since all previous attemps had failed, I decided to do it again. More throughly. I spend 2 minutes drawing and redrawing the line, putting an AMPLE amount of graphite on the card, to be SURE it would work. Put it back in my system, and the voltmod worked!

But far too well. My VRAM was fried, and there were (and still are) major artifacts to this day. Erasing the mod didn't do anything since I fried it with too much voltage. Oh well. Now I have a 9500np, that I modded to a 9700 Let's hope this thing dosen't go down from it!!

JigPu

I killed a 9700 Pro because condensation developed on my Prometeia cooling bus, and dripped down onto the back of the card. I sprayed a few layers of silicone conformal coating on my replacement to waterproof it. No problems since.

July 2002:

Had a PIII 600 @ 888 2.1V+ using a PEP66 and a 62W TEC, I started getting random restarts/lock-ups, but as I had some condensation problems before (dripped thru my V-card onto my NIC) I thought my V-card was bad, took it apart and noticed that the CPU pins were green

Cleaned my Slocket and CPU with Isopropyl and some other stuff and put them out in the sun to dry.......Wind.....1m drop on concrete floor....end of story.

My lesson: Even in the summer the wind doesn't play nice when you live on the 3rd floor.

Had an Athlon Slot A 750 that I overclocked to 1gig. This was before one gig chips, intel or AMD, were available. So I was hot stuff with a gigahertz. Anyways, about a year later I removed the heatspreader thing and lapped core and cooler. Ran fine for another three months before it died... right when I needed it the most. That day I had to run out and buy a 1700+ and a (gag) ECS k7s5a pro. Now I have the same chip in an NF7s V2.0 running at twice the speed of my old processor...

wow my worst two are playing with a setting i didnt know about and makeing it so my mobo couldnt have a cd-rom in the sec slave slot, it was a p166 o/c 255 in a chaintech mobo if you were wondering.
Or my pc speker disided to do something weird and melt itself to the case, and masively overloading the psu, black smoke poured out of it, before i flicked the power swich.
But (dont ask me how) it lived.
I havent killed anything costly or otherwise

I only have one $ hit. It was the first time I cut a bridge on an AMD XP (last week none the less). I dug in to far on the first attempt and killed the CPU -$50 for that one but I learned a cut paper clip works real good and to only scrape lightly under some sort of magnifying glass so you can see what your doing other than that just minor HDD corruption and over heats (with out CPU loss)

Hi,

Well, I have 2 stories :

- 1st one, I destroyed a tualatin CPU trying to remove the heat spreader... 100 $ lost.

- Second, I took off a voltage regulator on top of my pl-ip3/t when trying to remove the heatsink that I epoxied some days before. Luckily I could resolder it later on.


regards
FTC

HK:
- Went crazy in overvolting Palomino 1600+ with 2.3Vcore with an Al Heatsink and 60*60 fan. Replacement = TBred B 1700+
Loss around HK$960 = around US$120
Gained experience and experience of buying things online (1st time)

- Flashing BIOS and the thing hangged. Reflash BIOS in a store.
Loss HK$40 = around $5. and loss my priceless time
Gained experience

US:
- Mod the PSU. Electrocuted for a split second (i think)
Loss $0
Gained experience

- Overclocked too high. Corrupted Harddrive / Windows. Reinstall
Loss $0
Gained experience


Overall:
I gained enough experience that I am now a lv 100 newbie.







LMAO.

when i was a noob a stabed a mobo with a screwdriver because i thought i was supposed to use one because i had heard people here talk about using one but i didnt know i had a thumb heatsink (that i could not get on w/ my thumb) and the screwdriver was ment to be used a screwdriver heatsinks :0. The mobo didnt work afterwards

as for electricution... I've been electricuted 4 times as far as I remember.

once when I was 10 plugging something in which was too high up for me to reach, once when I was 15, trying to fix a battery charger, then 2 times around 2 years ago, once due to touching the heatsinks of a PSU while having bare feet on wet carpet, once when trying to adjust the pots in a PSU.

- Used the wiretrick to bump up the vcore up to 1.85 to see how far I could really overclock my system or what was holding me back in the first place. Found out it was my crappy generic ram anyway and removed the small wire out of the cpu socket. Well, that was the plan. I guess I didn't have a good grip on the small bugger and it fell somewhere on the MoBo.

That was two weeks ago and it is yet to be found. I know it is in my case somewhere waiting to short something *grin*. In te mean while I just use my pc anyway; have no other choice.

Verdict: I hope I'll never find out.
Gain: to use a screwdriver with a magnetic head the next time.


- Failed BIOS flash. I was hoping a new BIOS version was gonna give me options to overclock, but at the end I had a dead machine. Packard Bell wanted to help me for an amazingly cheap price of $300. It was actually even part of the waranty (somehow-don't ask me) so a replaced MoBo wouldn't cost me anything; some guy that had to do it for me would.

This was almost 6 years ago BTW. I was still n00bish to put it that way.

Verdict: lost $300. Not to PB, but by replacing the MoBo myself plus a new and better videocard.
Gain: Hihi, let me sum up.
- new and overclockable MoBo ánd AGP slot to upgrade
- tnt2 vs ati rage pro
- The knowledge assembling a pc saves alot of money compared to buying it as-is in a shop.
- $50 from the local shop I bought the pc. They felt sorry for me PB even refused to give me back my $50 for 2 years extra waranty.
- PB sucks