Which thing did I fry?

[MrSquished]

Well 20 years of building my own rigs, about one every few years, plus a few other people's rigs, I finally fried something. Never damaged a part before.

My asus z370-F was only seeing one stick of ram so I shut down to reseat the ram to eliminate that situation first. i shut down, waited a minute, grounded - then removed and reseated the ram. I forgot to turn off the power supply. now I can't post.

going to get new ram tomorrow but what are the chances i fried the motherboard, or even both things?

 

[Ken g6]

The computer was off but not physically switched off? That should have been enough. Maybe the motherboard cracked?

 

[MrSquished]

Correct. Shut down but the power supply was not switched off

The computer was off but not physically switched off? That should have been enough. Maybe the motherboard cracked?

 

[Bubbleawsome]

That’s a really weird hardware failure. Can’t say I’ve ever seen something break that easy before.

 

[MrSquished]

so i let it rest a bit. i took out the ram and swapped them back to their original slots, and she fired up just fine. on top of that it now sees all 16gb of RAM in bios and windows. wtf?

 

[UsandThem]

The thing with Windows 10 is it doesn't really shut down the whole way unless you select the option by holding down Ctrl when powering down.

The Asus board has anti-surge components in it, maybe they saved you this time.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, I do that from time to time.

Some people may not know this, but the +5VSB supplies power to the RAM, even when the ATX PSU is in the soft-off state. To swap/remove/upgrade/mess with the RAM, you are supposed to COMPLETELY remove power, which means, unplugging, or using the "hard kill" switch on the back of the PSU (which is all too easy to bump back into the ON position when you're moving the PC around, but I digress).

Yes, so far, of the times that I've forgotten this, I've been "lucky", but to be sure, I was "lucky" unplugging and plugging in carts on my Sega Genesis with the power on, to get some insane high scores to show to take pictures of, but that eventually fried the unit.

So, DO THE RIGHT THING, AND UNPLUG THE PSU, BEFORE CHANGING RAM STICKS OUT.

Just a PSA.

Generally, as long as you don't let out the "magic smoke", you could be OK, just kill all power to the board and whatnot, and let it sit for a few hours, then try powering it up again, maybe after re-seating things.

As you found, sometimes that can work wonders.

Edit: Oh yeah, go into "Power Options" in Win10, and SHUT OFF "Fast Startup" (which re-enables after every major upgrade). That way, when you select "Power Off", it actually does a real Shutdown.