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evga 680i board erupting in smoke.

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pyromuffin

Registered
Joined
Dec 6, 2004
This was pretty scary, I had just unpacked my mobo, set up the water cooling, and hooked up my new PSU. I plugged it into the mobo except for the 20 pin connector (the 2 cpu 4 pins, and the mystery molex). I paperclipped the 20 pin to get it to start without the motherboard pins, and to my surprise, smoke started pouring out of the case, and I mean a ton of smoke ( I couldn't see). After an astounded 5 seconds or so, I unplugged everything.

I first thought that one of the molex connectors had gotten wet and I had some melted plastic, but everything on my PSU seemed fine. I checked the video card and pump and everything seemed fine there. Finally, I checked the motherboard. Right under the CMOS battery, it was charred. The PCB seems to have burnt off a couple layers and one of the ICs seems to have disintegrated:eek:

Obviously some kind of short circuit occurred and this part of the board got a huge current. It's apparent that my board is completely f'ed, but what do you think the chances of my CPU and video card being all right? I don't have any other equipment to test out my stuff, and honestly I don't have the motivation to undo all my watercooling stuff and put everything back on air, right now.

Is now a good time to upgrade? I hear the new AMD cards are coming out soon, but how long until new sockets/cpus are due out?

Evga wont let me RMA the board because I don't have the invoice (it was a birthday gift), so that sucks incredibly hard. What do you guys think?
 
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Evga wont let me RMA the board because I don't have the invoice (it was a birthday gift), so that sucks incredibly hard. What do you guys think?
Have you called them? They are very good about RMA's. I've personally done 3 with no issues at all.
 
Have you called them? They are very good about RMA's. I've personally done 3 with no issues at all.

No, I set it up through the website, but they rejected it. Are they more likely to allow it over the phone?
 
No, I set it up through the website, but they rejected it. Are they more likely to allow it over the phone?
Yes since their system automatically rejects it. Like I said, I've had no issues and have never had to present an invoice.
 
I guess I'll give them a ring tomorrow when the open up, then. (still have to drain the loop, grumble grumble)
 
I agree with thideras about calling, the evga guys are great. I always try to mention that when it comes to RMAs, nothing has come close to evga's fantastic service.
 
They made me take some pictures of it, and I thought I'd post them here, too.
100_7119.jpg


Watch out, it's huge.
 
Well crap, guys. I stupidly registered it as an ebay purchase, even though my dad bought it from newegg for my birthday. I have no idea why I picked ebay, but I don't even know if I can get the physical invoice for it.

Anyways, the guys at evga said it was either a short in the PSU or a short to the case (which means that part of the mobo was somehow touching the case?). I'd sure like to hope it wasn't my psu, I just bought a brand new corsair 650 watt from newegg as well.

I don't want to spend the next 3 months of my life RMAing every single component in my computer.

I've got a multimeter, is there a way I could test the PSU with that to make sure it's spitting out the right stuff? I'm hesitant to just plug it into another computer.
 
It seems unlikely that the Corsair PSU is responsible.

1. It's a good brand.
2. Faulty PSU's either give too low wattage, or a power surge (thus going up in smoke themselves). Not constant output that's more than your components can handle while the PSU keeps on going. I've never heard of such an occurence at least.

Sounds like a short-circuit, which can occur in many ways.
You might not have inserted one of the RAM sticks the whole way down for example.
 
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