General tips / things that don't get mentioned / things you learn the hard way

[YoungMan]

Sort of a thread to share the things you learned the hard way, that you wish you didn't have to. Or the little things that come with certain configurations / setups / hardware / etc. that don't really get mentioned often. Doesn't have to be long or anything. Please share whatever you've got. It's always nice to learn from others mistakes and successes.

I'll start with some recent things that happened to me.

Crossfire doesn't work in windowed mode. Got suspicious when my FurMark and SC2 benchmarks were doing pretty poorly.

When making shorter sata cables, there is a minimum space required between each connector. I put the connectors too close together and it did not power up the hard-drive. Spaced it out a bit more and voila. This was on a molex to sata cable. I thought it might have been the connector or cable, so I swapped them out before discovering the culprit.

[igot6strings]

Those brass standoffs when installing a mobo. Make sure they all line up to a hole on the board and that theres no extras where there shouldnt be otherwise it creates all sorts of odd problems. I had alot of issues with my old x58 system because of an extra one sitting under my ram.

[sswilson]

Double/Triple check the length of your rad fan mounting screws to ensure you don't puncture one of the channels. :)

[Lpfan4ever]

A THOUSAND TIMES THIS: If a screw doesn't easily go in, IT'S THE WRONG ING ONE.

Forcing M3 screws into 6-32 threads is quite possibly the worst thing ever when it comes to time to take em out. Especially standoffs.

[great_big_abyss]

Plug in your 4/8-pin CPU cable before mounting the rear mounted AIO radiator.

[HoserEh]

Back in oh I think 2000-2002 my memory is fuzzy at times lol, I grabbed a Intel Celeron 1 Ghz PIII chip.I was hoping to oc to 1.5 Ghz as i heard they oc'd well, Popped the chip into the board and reinstalled the cooler. No post no beep.....after a while of trouble shooting I take the cooler off to find that I cracked a good 1mm piece of Cpu off of the die. Another story around the same time, me and a buddy decide to trade Vid cards, i forget what exact models. But I do remeber mine was a AGP 4X his was a AGP 8X, I popped my buddies Vid card into my system no issues....booted and gaming out. My Buddy popped mine into his system and powered up....nothing but smoke and sparks. My card melted and killed his mobo, ram and PSU, we found out that his mobo only supported AGP 8X and overvolted the Vid card.

[Nodscene]

If you ever drop a screw in a case make sure you take it out. No exceptions! I've made that mistake only one (it was 20 years ago), and the screw managed to wedge itself under the motherboard. I'm sure you can all imaging what happened when I powered it on :)

[KaptCrunch]

water cooling
loose fit up waterblock/s to get your hose lenght right with gentle curve, once done then remove water block/s and whole loop and test leak out side of the case

[enaberif]

Don't stick your fingers into the fly back of a 5 yr old crt monitor without knowing how to properly discharge it first.. You'll never do it again.

[KaptCrunch]

Originally Posted by enaberif

Don't stick your fingers into the fly back of a 5 yr old crt monitor without knowing how to properly discharge it first.. You'll never do it again.

lucky your here to tell the story 20Kv -50Kv hit

and the flat screen CCL circuits watch out for them too