I can't believe this happened

A few days ago I decided to reload Windows so that I could move my RAID to the Promise controller from the VIA controller. I get the unattended install going and everything is looking good so I go clean up the dinner dishes. About 5 minutes later I come back in the room and sniff, sniff....somethings burning. I look down and see white sparks shooting all over the body of my NV-68 and then I look up at the CPU water block. The acetal top is cracked and water is leaking onto my 6800 Ultra. Then...right before shutting the system off I see no water flowing through the res. Apparantly when the system restarted from the install, the pump didn't start with it. Everything fried....the CPU got so hot it cracked the top of the block and leaked on the GPU. Regardless of the water, I'm sure the GPU was shot from the heat as well. The AGP socket was burned all the way down to the board

It could be worse. I just bought the CPU so I RMA'd it..... I know, I know....but I wasn't about to be out 500.00 bucks. I exchanged the bad and got a new CPU and I always wanted to go PCI Express, but not since I still had the 6800U. I'm now the proud owner of an MSI SLI board and a whopping 6600GT for now...... At least my memory and other cards and drives didn't go with it.

At least the burning plastic smell is now gone......

That really is a bummer. Instead of using my relay to start my Eheim pump when the system starts, I decided long ago to just leave the Pump on 24/7 plugged into the wall, even if my system is off. (which is never, unless I leave town)

Plus i'm of the opinion if the Eheim pump is always on, it's less apt to fail. My Eheim pump in my living room's fountain has been on for 10 years.

Silversinksam said:

That really is a bummer. Instead of using my relay to start my Eheim pump when the system starts, I decided long ago to just leave the Pump on 24/7 plugged into the wall, even if my system is off. (which is never, unless I leave town)

Plus i'm of the opinion if the Eheim pump is always on, it's less apt to fail. My Eheim pump in my living room's fountain has been on for 10 years.

Click to expand...

I do the same with my Iwaki. If the PSU is turned on, the pump is running--I wired the Iwaki through the PSU's main on/off switch. There's no posibility that the computer is on and pump isn't. Saving a couple of bucks on my ConEd bill never seemed worth the risk loosing even a single component in one of my computers. But, I'm sure there are others who've played the ods and come out ahead....

what kind of waterblock and pump did you have?

For a couple months I had a job making waterfalls and such.. this was quite a while before I got into watercooling. After fooling around with tons of diff brands of pumps, etc. I noticed that FAR too often they would not start when they were plugged in.

Right when I noticed this I took note that if I was ever to use a 120V pump it would have to always be on. When you consider.. with a waterfall if the pump doesnt start, all that happens is your waterfall doesnt go. With watercooling.. if your pump doesnt start stuff like this happens.

Sorry for your loss man..

edit: Btw thats crazy as hell. When I first built my system I accidentally didnt plug the pump in for a good 5 mins.. temps didnt get THAT terribly bad. I guess I didnt have the heatload of the GPU like you though..

I always hate to see stories like this.
However, my main comment is why was auto shutdown not configured in the bios?

sunrunner20 said:

I always hate to see stories like this.
However, my main comment is why was auto shutdown not configured in the bios?

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Thats a really good point. I've got mine set to the lowest setting. (I think 55C)

Theres really no reason to not have it on with an AMD cpu. Its near impossible (even when I was on air) to get the thing to 55C unless something really wrong was going on. I think the highest temp I ever achieved was like 52C load using the settings in my sig on a zalman CNPS 7000 alcu.

hy was auto shutdown not configured in the bios

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That is exactly what I am thinking. The BIOS would have turned it off way before it could have gotten so hot if the temp shut down was set. I also thought that all modern processers have thermal shutdown protection built in, don't they?

what kind of waterblock and pump did you have

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I also am wondering what pump and CPU block you used as it should not have cracked.

what pump?
how is it your pump dd not turn on when power was supplied to the board? even durring install ALL boards go through power diagnostic check1 and 2 which that should have told your pump to turn on. the only hting i see is your pump didnt get enough power to start up.

Well... it was a D4 pump and a TDX acetal top. The D4 was connected straight from the PSU directly on it's own molex. I have a PC Power Cooling PSU, so I don't believe power is an issue.

I played around with the pump and res a bit and I see what the problem was. The pump turned on, but it wasn't pumping water. It was just shaking. If I wiggled it, then it would start pumping. Out of 10 times I started it, 3 it did this.

There was no automatic shutdown in my A8V BIOS....I'm 99% sure of that.

Live and learn..... I'm actually better off now. I now have an SLI board with half of the video cards. I returned the 6600GT because after having a 6800 Ultra, I just wasn't happy with the performance. I'm now the proud owner of a 7800GT and my 3dmark 06 scores are over 1000 higher than before.

I picked up a Big Typhoon and to be honest, the cooling isn't much better than the stock HSF that comes with the X2. The 7800 really doesn't need aftermarket cooling. I'm at 38 idle with just the stock cooling on it.

So.. did you set the thermal shutdown with your new mainboard?

The A8V does have that option in the BIOS as do all current boards. Make sure you set this to prevent any kind of problem again. If the pump is still in warranty I would for sure send it back for an RMA with an explanation of what happened as a result of the pump failure.

Wow what a bummer I am very sorry to hear that.

Daddyjaxx said:

There was no automatic shutdown in my A8V BIOS....I'm 99% sure of that.

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Extremely unlikely, I'd imagine its a required feature by amd now, it wouldnt be approved for use with their CPU's otherwise.

My A7V has auto-shutdown...

Okay...I must be a total moron, but I went through every setting in my new NEO4 BIOS and there is no setting for thermal shutdown. I looked at the manual as well and there is nothing in there for thermal shutdown....the same as the A8V. There are no user settings in hardware monitor and the only other temperature settings is the Smart Fan and Cool and Quiet.

I downloaded the manual and didn't see any settings for overload threshold in the hardware monitor section. That really sucks, must have been a lame BIOS.

hm... I have ran my system with the pump off before for a few minutes at a time and nothing bad happened. The temps were kind of high, but it didnt kill over. Infact the highest temp I ever saw was (I think) 68C back when I took silence over temperature and ran it fanless. That sucks for you though, did you double check to make sure the cpu actually died from heat and not because a leak caused a really bad short somewhere?

I set it in BIOS to shut down at 60 which is the lowest option. To test I turned off the pump... it got hot and locked up so it never shut down...

-pickles

thnk god i read this thread, after reading about this horror story i opened up my case and checked to see if everything was ok, then found that my apogee block was leaking, a droplet almost formed and would have fallen on my video card if i didnt check soon enough x_x