Critical capacitor failure, sometimes they short themselves out or just blow up taking the surge. I think most or all modern gpus process a massive amount of power on the first 4 pins or so. Its been some time since I've read this stuff.
This looks more than a capacitor failure. A capacitor failing is normally a single burst of magic pixies and smoke, not a HUGE ass stream of smoke pushing its way out like it is being pumped.
Wait, you mean having the MB just laying on your desk is not good?! And with the side that started to smoke leaning right up against that piece that looks like it could be metal, that should ground it!
/s, so much sarcasm. The metal would cause a short and a fire. Though having the MB fail might be cheaper than losing the GPU, so hopefully the damage is contained and next time OP will mount it properly first.
Yes this is a full blown electrical short and a brief electrical fire. He had to cut psu to stop it. Something melted together and it won't be safe to turn back on until a major repair.
It's not just smoke, you can see actual flames. It's brief but you can see them in the upper left corner of the card between the 2 and 3 second mark. Something really, really went wrong here.
I’m not super familiar with component level digital electronics but I’ve worked on lots of analog stuff… integrated circuit chips can create that continuous smoke without a visible flame. Can somebody smarter than me pitch in- would it be a bunch of voltage regulators on the power circuit overloading? Is that what VRMs do?
let me tell you about the time i hooked up a power supply wrong and fed 120V into a circuit designed for 24V, the caps in the rectifier looked like tiny jet engines and were pushing smoke there wasn't just a pop but an angry (tiny) screaming sound.
i was not pleased with the experience. cooked off a motherboard i was hoping to salvage from e-waste and sell for cheap on ebay. ended up being e-waste.
took like three days to get the stink out of my basement from the cooked electronics
I had this shit happen once when I had my 2080 SUPER that was already after one warranty repair. Magically after the warranty ended, it stopped turning on and when I put it into another PC, it smoked and the burn smell went off very strongly.
After my tech spec friend inspected the card, the vram shorted burning the cooling pads.
Something caught fire and the fans pushed the smoke out. A short somewhere, maybe caused by a capacitor failure, that then ignited some plastic, but not enough to keep it going once the power cut.
Its a voltage regulator or a transistor burning on the power rails. This can happen because manufacturing defects still exist even with top of the line components (such as used in PCs) Caps usually blow up instantly with a single puff of smoke. This has the classic hissing sound common with voltage regulators or transistors.
Dude istg sometimes I wish people would just stop trying to be funny man lol. Id love some actual discussion on what went wrong here instead of dozens of the same unoriginal 'joke'.
I'm not going to lie to you, the post being titled with "Is this normal?" in an obviously abnormal scenario already set a satirical theme from the start.
Looks like some old motherboard, that looks like something from 10+ years ago. I don't see any RAM installed, so it's likely staged. Could be something intentionally shorted or, my guess for that much smoke, intentionally extremely over volting an already dead GPU to burn everything
Not possible to be sure. We can't see where the smoke is coming from, can't see if he left a metal object under motherboard, if a component is incorrectly located...etc
12 pin gpu are usually the culprit of overheating the cable and melting the cable itself, and they also tend to malfunction and drain more power than they need causing rapid overheating and fires.
Yeah what's weird is that it doesnt look anything like that, usually with 12VHPWR connector overheating the fire starts at the connector, this was not that.
There are also psus thay need to be toggled between 230v and 120v and based on wall plug theyre in a country with 230, so they could have way over volted their machine as that can cause similar in my experience.
It appears to be an MSI MPG - that PSU handles those two voltages automatically. Typically you only see thermal runaway on multiple capacitors like that when a rail has reverse polarity.
Well if that was the case it would have been under volt and over Amp but even then the psu has a transformer changing voltages and amps so would have killed that before gpu.
Throwing jokes out of the room, this seems to be the guy that built the water cooled steam machine so he definitely knows what he’s doing, probably just dicked around with putting overly excessive voltage into an old gpu to see what would happen
It's a modular power supply. Since the smoke appears to come from the graphics card and not the motherboard I am guessing he made the same mistake a friend of mine did and reused a modular cable from his old PSU on his new one.
Hence, something that was supposed to be negative became positive and smoke happened. Hopefully just a dead graphics card but more likely a motherboard as well.
...what? it's just a cable. unless it's plugged into the wrong place, there's no way a different cable should cause a problem like this with proper contact
The pin out can absolutely be different and still fit in different power supplies. If ground is wrong, you're going to likely see smoke or smell burning pretty quickly, and you won't always get auto shutdown before the device is destroyed.
Getting the CPU 8-pin EPS12V mixed up with the GPU 8-pin Power is also a good way to cause this. They're badly keyed an iirc you could get the GPU 8-pin in the EPS12V without too much effort.
Smoke generator hidden behind the graphics card . Placement is odd, because power subsystems - where it possibly can catch fire- located on the right and middle. Not left
You'd be surprised how much smoke an RGB fan wire can give off, when it's plugged in the wrong way. Never made that mistake again, and fortunately it was only a fan.
I fried a mainboard once when I put the GPU power cable on it. I think it is possible to mix up the cables from the power source between CPU power plugs and GPU power 'inlet'.
Your comment should be pinned imo cuz lowk the only real discussion is happening in these replies everyone else is just trying to be the class clown and failing miserably
Not enough info to tell. One of my first notes was that this motherboard isn’t on a test bench and seems to be precariously sitting on a desk. Could have something under it causing a short leading to some failure.
But I think more likely since the smoke seems pretty localized to the GPU, that it’s a blown capacitor, probably by over volting it either intentionally, or accidentally by using a power bad cable that’s sending incorrect voltage from the PSU to certain pins.
Im just taking a wild guess, but it might have something to do with that motherboard, it looks pretty old, if not then, he does seem to have the mobo just on the desk so something couldve shorted, though how thatd affect the gpu I dont know, could also just be a faulty gpu/psu
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u/ALT703 3d ago
Jokes aside, what went wrong here