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Motherboard caught fire....

O

Onehate

Member
I was trying to hook up another graphic card to my miner. R9 290, I had a powered 16x to 1x riser, hooked up the new card and booted. PC would not boot at all. I disconnected the new card, tried rebooting the PC and looks like the heat sink on the motherboard caught fire. I was hoping someone could explain wtf happened here?

BTW the motherboard is a MSI FM2-AB5XA-G41.

Cheers
 
Here is the fire damage, you can see where the board is warped alittle

mb3mkl.jpg


This is the motherboard

24lmpl5.jpg


This is the R9 290

j15wkk.jpg


2m6x55i.jpg


Cheers
 
Whatever's under that heatsink on the motherboard, its probably damaged.
My guess is you ll need a new one.

Hopefully nothing has happend with the much more expensive graphics cards.


It was an actual fire, flame went up to 2 inches and took me about 10 seconds to blow it out...
Click to expand...

Holy shyt... usually when someone says it caught on fire, its just "a flash of light and some smoke", and a capacitor or some such that blew.

How hot does that motherboard get? where do you keep your Bitcoin miner? is it some place without much air circulation? or like in a stuffy little cabinet?
 
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Well it had not even been booted for afew hours. I was going to go ahead and work on getting the second and third working. Also the rig is in an open crate, with plenty of airflow.

Like I said I tried booting it up with one inline to the PCI-Express slot, plugged the second one into the small slot with the riser. It would not boot, so I unplugged the second one, and rebooted. The fire happened when I rebooted the thing with only the orginal card in, the one that had been working the past two weeks. Everything from the secondary was uplugged, from the motherboard and from the power supply.
 
VRMs are generally in that location. Maybe the 290 pushed the power consumption coming through the PCIE slot too high and some VRMs went up in smoke.
 
From everything I read you should not even have to use a powered riser for only two cards on a motherboard. What would be the diffrence between having that plugged in with a 1x riser vs being plugged into the second PCI-Express slot?
 
Those are the VRMs for the CPU. The GPU likely had nothing to do with those blowing because the output of those feed CPU VCore, RAM Voltage. Also, placing PCBs directly on carpet like that is a really bad idea, especially given the cost of that card.
 
Well I guess my next question is, assuming everything else is in working order, if I RMAed this board, would the same issue happen to the replacement board?

Not exactly sure how hooking up a second GPU should over charge the CPU. This is somewhat over my head at the moment, but I still do not undersand how hooking up two GPU's should blow that board out.
 
This is just a shot in the dark, but is it possible the culprit was the powered riser? Those things aren't exactly common; if it was built incorrectly it could send power over a PCIe data line, which would cause all sorts of problems.

If the riser did short out the motherboard, that in turn could very well have lead to a fire.
 
I've seen something like this happen a few times, on old ASROCK mobo's, on a couple of dell OptiPlex mobos, and one other I cant remember (none of which where mine, but I was doing the repairs for it).

Always chalked it up as just defective board circuity or "pinches" that cause one particular area waaaay more voltage than it should be getting.

Even a faulty heatsink or one not secured/pasted propely, I've seen CPU's and GPU's go up in smoke... literally. I would think no different for mobo components.
 
You have my condolences. My mobo just blew too, rig was off when I got back home earlier this weekend. Turned it on, nothing. Swapped in a new PSU, nothing. Took out video cards, this time it booted but only for a split second. Tried it again, and I saw an orange-yellow glow and smoke. Took almost an hour to completely air out the room. Not sure if it damaged anything else along with it. We'll see how good or bad ASUS's RMA is for this.
 
At the very least the rest of your equipment is ok.

blastingcap, ASUS recently got rid of their BBB "F" Rating in place of an "A" rating, how I do not know.... But it's possible they have started taking care of those RMA issues, I'm unsure.
 
sobe88 said:
At the very least the rest of your equipment is ok.

blastingcap, ASUS recently got rid of their BBB "F" Rating in place of an "A" rating, how I do not know.... But it's possible they have started taking care of those RMA issues, I'm unsure.
Click to expand...

Easy, from what I've heard, the BBB "game" is "pay to win",
 
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