Motherboard went on fire...

furlonb3

Hey,

I thought this would be the place to post this, I hope someone here has some idea what happened me. Had some trouble with my machine yesterday. I recently bought a fanless grahpics card and a near-silent heatsink from overclockers.co.uk (the stock heatsink was horribly loud). As I was trying to remove my old heatsink, the chip (Phenom II x4 965) came out with it, stuck on with the thermal paste. So when I'm trying to get the CPU off the old heatsink, when I accidentally let it drop, resulting in some bent pins. I straightened these out and put the CPU back in the board (ASRock 970 Extreme4), then put the new heatsink on (Coolermaster 612S). When I reconnected everything, the board would not boot.

Eventually after hours of disconnecting parts trying to debug (RAM, GCard), the board boots, then shuts down after some beeps. I try again, but no luck. This repeated itself every 5 minutes or so for about 20 minutes. I left it for a few minutes as the board was showing no sign of life at all, but I left the PSU (Coolermaster 700W Silent Pro) connected and switched on. All of a sudden the board starts to smoke near where the ATX Power connection from the PSU connects to the board. Within a second a little bright orange light, and then a tiny flame appears. I instantly disconnect the PSU from the socket, and remove my RAM (Corsair Vengeance), graphics card (ATI 5450 512MB Silent), and SSD (Crucial 256GB). All these were connected at the time of the disaster.

My PSU, board, CPU, RAM, and SSD are all only 3 months old (got them from Komplett). Before today I had this machine working fine with an older graphics card, no problems at all (just too noisy). It was rarely on as I was saving up for some quieter gear.

I'm guessing that the PSU, by a massive coincidence, failed yesterday and short circuited the board if it went on fire. Could my RAM, Graphics card, and SSD have been damaged from this? Anyone any ideas what happened?

ED E

furlonb3 wrote: »

Anyone any ideas what happened?

You dropped your CPU.

furlonb3

I don't see how putting a broken CPU (assuming it is broken, the board did start up for a few seconds flashing diagnostic messages before turning off) into a board results in a fire near the ATX Power connection on the board when it was turned off?

ScumLord

I've had to straighten pins on a CPU before for a friend, PC still works fine. I don't see how a damaged CPU would cause a fire either.

You should have looked up what the beeps meant before continuing, I would have assumed there would be a number of fail safes stopping things like fires from happening. Are you sure some cleaning fluid or something didn't get left on the board? That stuff is usually pure alcohol and highly flammable.

furlonb3

No, it was a straight swap out of the heatsinks. From reading similar stories online looks like the new heatsink must have been touching off the case, letting current run right through everything. Pretty stupid mistake, paid the price if it's all fried

ED E

My first response wasnt so serious, tone doesnt always convey so well through text. I've straightened a pin before that was bent in shipping, also working fine.


My electrical knowledge is limited but I guess its possible that a damaged/dead CPU could have caused a short and pulled far too much juice from the PSU.

In a disaster case like this the only real way to know if the other components are ok is to check them. Get another machine and stress test everything individually.