Well, it finally happened to me

[Bonesdad]

Burned a mobo...small fire, but big enuf for a marshmallow roast.

PSU burned out on it couple weeks ago...thot the mobo was dead then, but I wanted to try it with a new PSU.

Picked up a new Fortron PSU and put it together...turned it on...power, but no post...rats i thot, reaching for the power switch

Heard a POP! then that smell...duck me head down and see the flames...unplug the PSU.

It was only a 3.5 year old K7S5A, but it had served me flawlessly for that long as well. Buried it in the back yard last night.

So now the question is...did it take my CPU (again, no great loss, its a Duron 900) and my GPU (Hercules Kyro2) - you have to understand, this is my third tier PC.

What are the chances any (or all) of my other components are fried?

 

[Peter]

Well, a dying power supply may take everything down the drain. I wouldn't trust a single component taken out of a system that has suffered PSU death. You'll just take the risk of frying even more stuff. Like, questionable CPU tried in new mobo, no work. Put known-good CPU in, still no work! Why? Bad CPU has fried the voltage regulators on your good mainboard. Right. Throw that mainboard out too, put your known good CPU into the next mainboard. No work. Why? The previous board has toasted this CPU too, and this toasted CPU has now fried the 3rd board as well. Repeat until out of money. I've seen it happen (not to me )

 

[DieHardware]

C'mon Peter, these are just parts, not some sort of SARS outbreak.

 

[pspada]

Well, I think it's a crap shoot. I've seen systems that were submerged in an inch or so of water shorting out for several days still run, and systems that just had a power supply go dead of which no components ever worked again. But he's right, you need to be careful of not runing good components testing the bad ones.

 

[Peter]

Yeah, I too had someone short out the ENTIRE mainboard recently ("forgot" to use the brass standoffs when mounting the board into the case ...) and damage absolutely nothing.

Warnings are always warning about the worst case ... partly so that people can feel lucky afterwards when they got away with more luck

 

[Melectricus]

I'd tend to agree with Peter. A bad PSU can take out parts of a system in a cascade of failures. The issue is the PSU took out the Mobo, with the mobo bad then what happened? I had a circular problem like this once with a biostar mobo, where the mobo went south - really bad ( without knowing it was a mobo) and by the time I narrowed it down, I burned up two processors and a power supply swapping out parts - never did figure out why the original psu stayed fine. Some one correct me here but the likelyhood of a corrupt processor or possibly corrupt memory stick causing a new failure is somewhat remote but greater with a processor ( note Pci -Agp <U>usually </U>survive), but.. smoking mosfets and with the duron..I'd tend to be leary enough that the salvage value isn't worth it and give up and move on but retry memory,pci and agp....

 

[Bonesdad]

yeah, I've been wondering if using the CPU on another board might cause a problem. If I had another throw-away mobo, I might try it, but I don't. I'm fine with losing this mobo and even the CPU. I hope to hang on to the memory and agp card, so I will give them a try. Otherwise, no PCI cards. Not a great loss, but a great lesson. Anyone else agree with Melectricus?

 

[Sideswipe001]

I had a motherboard go up when my Wake on LAN caused the computer to turn on while I was plugging the NIC in. Something roasted then and I smelt the smells of burning motherboard, causing a two week long cycle of replacing computer parts to try to find out what still worked. I eventually threw the whole thing out and started over to get a working computer, after the processor (and RAM) were both determined to be dead.

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

Peter is right.