Video card caught on fire... to much DC for it to handle

[dajeepster]

heh... I just had a sapphire radeon 3650 catch on fire today while crunching collatz conjecture.
it's a Phenom II 940 on an Asus M3A32 motherboard with 4 video cards crunching collatz conjecture
http://boinc.thesonntags.com/collatz/show_host_detail.php?hostid=5283
and the cpu is crunching NFS
http://escatter11.fullerton.edu/nfs/show_host_detail.php?hostid=5548

I pulled out the bad video card... it was freakin hot too.
put the computer outside on the patio in the cold...
turned it back on and now it's continued it's duties crunching... it's hard core baby!!!..

Here's the pics of the card
http://s850.photobucket.com/albums/ab68/dajeepster/crashNburnSapphire3650/

 

[mk]

Scary.

You can get a good ROI from GPUs even if they wear out more quickly when crunching but certainly not enough if they burn the house down.

 

[biodoc]

Wow!

You are hardcore dajeepster!

 

[RobertE]

Dust bunnies are flammable.

 

[Keysplayr]

That's it. No more folding when I'm not home. This just scared the hell out of me.

 

[Ken g6]

And I was just thinking about getting a video card for DC!

Was it overclocked? Was it dusty?

Also, I imagine Collatz uses the video card harder than Folding. What temps were you getting before it burned up?

 

[dajeepster]

And I was just thinking about getting a video card for DC!

Was it overclocked? Was it dusty?

Also, I imagine Collatz uses the video card harder than Folding. What temps were you getting before it burned up?

it wasn't overclocked.. you can see in the pics about how dusty it was, but it wasn't the dust that caught on fire... looked more like power regulators. it used to do folding, but i got better results with collatz so I switched over...

as for temps, it was "flaming hot"

 

[Assimilator1]

Lol!, but yea that is scary!
Don't think I'll use GPU crunching whilst I'm out either!

 

[RobertE]

That looks more like a componet failure vs dust bunnies bursting into flames. I'd send ATI or whoever made the card those pictures with a terse email about the quality of their stuff. At a minimum, they should replace the card, best case, you score some other freebies.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Ouch. I wonder how hot my VRMs get on my four 9600GSOs. Maybe it's better I'm not running that box right now.

 

[dajeepster]

That looks more like a componet failure vs dust bunnies bursting into flames. I'd send ATI or whoever made the card those pictures with a terse email about the quality of their stuff. At a minimum, they should replace the card, best case, you score some other freebies.

it was a component failure... dust won't cause the factory sealed smoke to release from the vrms and the dust would have burned up too quickly to be able to cause the pcb to revert back to it's liquidfied state.

 

[dajeepster]

Ouch. I wonder how hot my VRMs get on my four 9600GSOs. Maybe it's better I'm not running that box right now.

just put it outside

 

[Markfw]

Well, I have had 23 cards 24/7, an all I have burned up it a PSU.

 

[dajeepster]

Well, I have had 23 cards 24/7, an all I have burned up it a PSU.

I haven't burned up a psu... but i'm had a couple with fans on psu (cooler master) that stopped working and then the psu quickly followed suit.

 

[Assimilator1]

My brothers old PC had a PSU catch fire after some popping noises! :Q, no sign of fan failure before hand. That was a Hiper 430 unit which had far more than enough power to run his then Sempron @2.4 GHz.
I had an Antec TPII 430 come very close to catching fire a few months back, only reason it didn't was the landlady smelt burning & turned it off! , I was at work. That's about the 4th bloody Antec unit I've had die on me!! (different rigs). The only odd noises from my TPII 430 prior to its death were an odd semi-rythmitic chearping/squeaking noise (not coming from the fan), but it had done that on & off for many months before hand so I ignored it, won't do that again!
Neither of us were GPU crunching at the time, inccidently even when I was GPU crunching my rig was only drawing ~280w from the wall. So not much over 50% load on the PSU.

 

[biodoc]

I had 2 Antec power supplies fail too. luckily, no smoke or fire though. My boss had a PSU fail while he was on vacation. The computer wasn't on but it was plugged in. When he got home there was a strong electrical burning smell.

I'm going to replace my cheap PSUs with high quality units. Unfortunately, with the layout of money, no increase in PPD.

I found a website, johnnyGURU, that evaluates PSUs for efficiency and measures voltage stability. I've never looked into PSU quality. I always grabbed the cheapest that delivered enough power.

I have visions of flames leaping out of the top fan on my antec 900 case!! D:

 

[loafbred]

I only run my two folding pc's during cool weather, and I just had my first two failures, one on each pc, both happening in one week... a fairly old Antec 120mm fan with sleeve bearing, and a Fortron Blue Storm II 500 watt psu. The psu didn't completely die, but the voltage regulation went haywire on the 12v. I replaced it with one of the Enhance 500w units I got from geeks.com for $13 each, but ordered a Seasonic 750w to replace it. I won't run a cheaply made psu 24/7 again. I'm also going to start checking that all fans are working, daily.

 

[dajeepster]

I have visions of flames leaping out of the top fan on my antec 900 case!! D:

take pics take pics

 

[petrusbroder]

I have visions of flames leaping out of the top fan on my antec 900 case!! D:

Hot cruncher!!!

 

[mk]

Well, I have had 23 cards 24/7, an all I have burned up it a PSU.

No wonder. Few PSUs can handle such load.

 

[Assimilator1]

I had 2 Antec power supplies fail too. luckily, no smoke or fire though. My boss had a PSU fail while he was on vacation. The computer wasn't on but it was plugged in. When he got home there was a strong electrical burning smell.

I'm going to replace my cheap PSUs with high quality units. Unfortunately, with the layout of money, no increase in PPD.

I found a website, johnnyGURU, that evaluates PSUs for efficiency and measures voltage stability. I've never looked into PSU quality. I always grabbed the cheapest that delivered enough power.

I have visions of flames leaping out of the top fan on my antec 900 case!! D:

Anandtech reviews test voltage stability & efficiencies too .

 

[biodoc]

Anandtech reviews test voltage stability & efficiencies too .

Yep, read them too!

I went with the seasonic S12D 750 watt. Newegg has them on sale.

 

[PCTC2]

Power Supplies are one thing I never skimp on, since it is the backbone of your PC. It has the ability to fry everything in one go, so I always get them with efficiency at the load I run (usually 60-75% of the total load for 24/7 usage). I don't want cheap components to fail so I run the best, ever since a cheap PSU fried my 6 disk RAID5. I guess the RAID was not the point of failure for data security after all...

Right now I run Seasonic X750's, Corsair HX series, and a Zalman ZM850-HP.

But I'm kinda scared for the future. I bought my SuperMicro X8DTH-6F because it has 7 x8 electrical PCIe slots in x16 physical slots. I wanted to run 4 to 7 Galaxy GTX260+ Razors in there but worried about the heat generation and frying the cards. Maybe I'll stick with 3 full-sized cards in the future. Maybe Fermi. .

 

[rabrittain]

Man -- It seems like it was less than a year ago when someone on the team questioned whether of not crunching could smoke a 'puter. I think he thought that it is impossible. ...WRONG!!!!

 

[Markfw]

That's it. No more folding when I'm not home. This just scared the hell out of me.

I never do. But I also set my fans@70% and watch the temps. They never go over 70c.