Tell us your PC building horror stories!

Have you forgotten to ground yourself and shorted out your motherboard? Did you hook up your CPU cooler incorrectly and only realize it when smoke started to fill the room? Has your water cooling sprung a leak, leaving your rig to a Titanic fate?

Building your own PC can be a difficult task, and unfortunate accidents will eventually happen for even the most experienced builders. But the best way to heal is to laugh at our pain, so we want to hear your best (or worst) PC building horror stories. Components destroyed, I/O covers causing stitches, mysterious blue smoke pouring from your case—whatever it is we want to hear about it. We’ll collect your stories and feature the most tragic ones in an article next week. Here’s how to submit your own:

Post your story in the comments below, and don’t spare the gruesome details. If you have a short and sweet tale to tell, that’s fine too, but make sure we get the picture.
Speaking of pictures, if you have any photos of the accident in action, upload them to a site like Imgur and post the link in your comment. If you don’t have a picture of flame and smoke, send us a picture of your rig now to show how it all turned out. A picture isn't necessary, but I'm told they're worth a thousand words.
And finally, upvote and comment on other people’s stories. We won’t be selecting them based solely on upvotes, but it’s important to know if a story resonates with a lot of people.

And just to be clear, we don’t want to scare anyone away from building a PC. We still believe that everyone should build their own PC and encourage newcomers to do so. But the best way to learn is by making mistakes, so why not let others make the mistakes for you?

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