Strange sound, smell

[VirtualLarry]

Tonight, I started smelling what seemed to be a metallic burning smell. I also, at some point, I forget whether it was before or after, but it could have been before, I heard something, like the CD-ROM tray closing on my secondary rig. However, it was already closed.

So, fearing that I had blown a capacitor while running DC, I shut both of those rigs down, and smelled them, and checked the caps with a flashlight. They are both running high-quality mobos, so losing a cap would be unusual, but I suppose possible. I didn't notice anything amiss with a visual inspection, so I fired them both up again.

I did have the window open near the computers when I smelled the smell, but it didn't seem like it was coming from the outside. It seemed like it might be coming from another apt., like if someone left a boiling pot of water on the stove and it boiled dry.

I dunno what it was from. I'm keeping a close eye on my computers.

 

[bononos]

You're instincts were right, I think I smelled something like that and found out later that the burst capacitor gunk had spread around the mb.

 

[Motorheader]

Power supply possibly?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Power supply possibly?

Could be. I smelled it, but I didn't take it apart. Couldn't conclusively say it was the PSU.

But it has been under a lot of load. I had two nearly-identical rigs, but I upgraded the rig on the right to a Rosewill Blackhawk case, and the temps dropped pretty good. I'm still running the computer on the left, and it has a top-mount PSU, and the PSU seems to absorb the heat from the GPU and the CPU, meaning that the top of my case (and thus the PSU), is nearly so hot that I cannot touch it.