OT: New PC!

[Thermodyne]

AgentZero said:
OK, AT, looks like I might get my motherboard from ENU, but for the rest, NewEgg.com's got em beat.
As for overclocking, I'll tell you a little story about why I'd never do it.

When I was in High School, I had the most brilliant computer science teacher ever. He was a bit odd, never actually slept, just took lots of 30min catnaps throughout the day, but he knew EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING PC related. One day, he let a few of the geekier members of the class play around with overclocking a few of the PCs, with explicit instructions to clean the dust out of their insides first, to be very careful, and to switch the machines off when they were done. Of course, they didn't pay him any attention because they were uber and knew what they were doing, so they didn't clean out the dust (of which there was a considerable amount), and they left the machines running when they went home. During one of Mr. Miaki's (MiaKI not MiaGI!) catnaps, a few of the machines overheated enough to ignite some of the dust, which in turn ignited some paper left nearby (so much for being careful!) and within a few minutes there was a nice fire going. Mr. Miaki never woke up because the smoke & fumes kept him unconcious, and though his life was saved by the fire brigade, he came out of it so badly brain damaged that to this day he has to re-learn to tie his shoes every morning.

And that, in essence, is why I wouldn't OC anything. Especially since I have my PC in my bedroom, and have a habit of leaving it on overnight. I don't think I'd ever sleep a wink after overclocking my machine, even if I had the most expensive phase change cooling system in the world. I know it's unlikely the same thing would happen, but one does not recover from the trauma of losing a friend like that very easily.

Sounds like an urban legend..or.......

Cough Cough....bull****......Cough Cough

I've let the smoke out of a few processors and mainboards, but never had anything close to a fire. If one of those PC caught fire, it was prolly rigged to do so.

[AgentZero]

Well, I can give you a number for him, and you can ask him about it but he usually only answers around 12 noon when an attendant is helping him with lunch, since when he's alone the telephone frightens him since he doesn't know what the 'alarm' is for.
As for whether it was on purpose, it was ruled an accident, but the possibilty is there. And it's really not that difficult, given the nature of dust (and I'm not talking a thin film of dust either, I'm talking under-your-bed kind of dust, proper dust bunnies & all that, since the school board had all kinds of red-tape surrounding even opening the cases [since it 'voids the warranty'] so they didn't allow very frequent cleaning), that once it achieves high enough temperature, it creates a nice little air circulation effect, sending dust floating all over the place, and if any of that dust happens to ignite, it doesn't take long for it to spread.
And while burning dust usually doesn't last long enough or produce the heat required to melt and ignite computer components, it can ignite paper, and burning paper does create the temperatures needed to get plastic burning.
So even if I stored my PC in a freezer, I still wouldn't be comfortable overclocking anything.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Oh man, that's bad. Read the instructions first.