It's Halloween! It's that time of the year to sit around the pulsing LEDs of your mechanical keyboard and swap scary stories about how you almost bought the wrong RAM once.
We're irredeemable nerds here, so ghost stories about bigfoot and nessie and all those other monsters don't really do it for us because you have to be outside to run into them. No, we're far more terrified by the real life terror of hundreds of dollars worth of components eating dirt because in our bravado we plugged the water cooler into the wrong socket.
Tfw you put too much thermal paste on the heat spreader
— HyperX: Rose Gold MIX dropped! (@HyperX)October 20, 2019
Share with your PC building horror stories!
You guys appear to be the same, as when we asked earlier this week if you had any of your own PC building horror stories to share you didn't let us down. So here's our pick of your scariest PC building horror stories. Your computer will never enter sleep mode again! [evil laugh]
Wait for it
The key to any great horror story is...suspense. And often the scariest part of any PC building mishap is the long wait to see whether the screen will blink back into life absolving you of your sins. In fact, that little bit of hope, that maybe you got lucky this time, is what makes the inevitable result even more crushing when it does arrive. So imagine @KrusingGG's waking nightmare of not knowing for days whether his PC would boot again. And did it? Does this story have a happy ending? We may never know and that, dear readers, is the true horror.
Hellfire
Heat is the enemy of the PC builder. No matter how many water-coolers you pipe in, fans you install or how long you argue about whether it's better to have them creating positive or negative pressure (positive is better, fight us) there will always be too much heat for your precious hardware. The constant battle to keep your temperatures low is a horror on its own, but during the PC build itself is the sweatiest time for thermophobes. Dear Theo here must have had heart palpitations watching the CPU redline after realizing his watery error, but this time you get a resolution. Everything was safe and sound after plugging the pump in. The moral of the story? There's a lot of stuff to plug in. Just so much.
A bed of nails
No maneuver in all of the PC building ballet is more nerve-wracking than clamping your CPU into the LGA socket. It's almost as if they cursed that little lever with dread energy, designed to spike your paranoia to paranormal levels as you imagine irreversibly ruining the brain of your new gaming rig. Those rows and rows of pins looking like the mouth of a hungry Sarlacc pit, ready to devour your wallet after they get bent and twisted when you inevitably forget to take the plastic plate off the bottom of the new CPU before trying to force it in. We can only imagine what horrors befell xCurety's motherboard but there's no way we're picking through this crime scene with a pair of pliers. That thing's toast. RIP.
Ashes to ashes
If there's one thing worse than heat for a PC, it's the invisible detritus we leave behind in our day to day lives. Dead skin and hair, sloughing off us as we trudge towards the grave, floating around in the air before being sucked into the PC and slowly strangling that which brings us joy. Dust. We're talking about dust. The way it insidiously finds a way inside (even though there's a filter on every fan and, as we told you before, we make sure there's a POSITIVE pressure gradient so how could it get into the PC? How? Answer us!) and then sends your fans off balance before they finally start grinding against themselves, scraping at their bearings and squeaking out in pain. Horrible dust. And here's Dan, with what is possible the most horrifying human cell graveyard we've ever seen. Not even canned air can help you here, Dan. Call a priest.
Do you have any PC building horror stories worse than these that will keep us awake at night? Let us know in the comments, or reply to us on Twitter with more!
