We want your worst PC building horror stories

Building a PC is a special kind of ritual: Shopping for parts, waiting eagerly for them to arrive, and assembling everything. There's a magical joy in pressing the power button the first time and hearing everything whir to life. But nothing is more devastating than when a simple mistake (or several) turn what should be a lovely, exciting afternoon into an unending nightmare.

Maybe you didn't apply the thermal paste properly or sprung a leak in your liquid cooling system. Maybe you thought you just had to push really hard to get that graphics card to fit and it ended up breaking.

It's been two years since we last asked our community to open up and share their PC building horror stories. And I have a hunch that those two years have spelled disaster for more than one poor PC. So that's why this week we want your most gruesome, most despairing tales of how your build went wrong. Spare us no detail, the more information we have as to how things went so wrong the better. And if you have a picture you can share, upload it to Imgur and share it.

Hop into the comments and make us cringe. Next week, we'll round up our favorite PC building horror stories and share them with you.

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.