Serious question, has anyone else had a motherboard standoff cause a weird short?

I was fixing a gaming PC in a friend's garage yesterday and the system kept rebooting randomly. After an hour of checking the PSU and RAM, I finally spotted a single extra standoff under the board that wasn't lined up with a hole, creating a tiny short to the case. I've been building systems for five years and never caught that before. What's the weirdest short you've ever found?

2 comments

2 Comments

nathanstone21d ago

Oh man, that's the PC building version of a ghost in the machine! I bet that extra standoff was just sitting there laughing at you the whole hour. My weirdest short was from a single stray screw hiding under a graphics card, took forever to find. How do these tiny bits of metal cause so much chaos?

faitha4020d ago

Found a short once from a thermal pad that oozed out and touched some SMD capacitors. It was conductive and created a weird path to the heatsink. That one had me pulling my hair out for a solid weekend.