Short Circuits
Burned but fully working
I WAS IN THE PROCESS of upgrading the motherboard on my PC this week. I got in two brand new GTX 1080 cards to play with, and figured, hey, why not just upgrade the entire system? So I did that, and pushed the power button. Silence.
The system turned on but nothing actually came on. The motherboard had lights, but no fans were spinning. Nothing. I turned it off, and back on again. Still nothing. After checking to make sure everything was seated properly, I tried again. Nothing yet again. So I figured, let’s push the BIOS reset button. Pop! Pop! Smoke. I freaked out.
I immediately unplugged and took everything apart. I saw smoke around the top of the first GTX 1080 and the CPU area, and thought, “Oh no, my brand new GTX 1080!” I sniffed all the components, and there was a bad electrical burn smell on the back of the graphics card that was sitting in PCIe slot 1. I decided to put the system back together piece by piece, and power it on without the GPUs. It booted and POSTed. I was relieved, but then was really worried about the GPU. I put in the second GPU, turned on the system, and it POSTed. Then I thought, “OK, let’s try the one that smelled bad.” I put both GPUs in, and turned on the system. It POSTed and booted into Windows just fine. Bizarre!
Everything seemed to be working normally. And then I got a CPU temperature warning: 89 C. Uh, oh! I checked the CPU fan and liquid cooler pump. They weren’t working. As it turned out, using both CPU_FAN and CPU_OPT is bad, because both headers run on the same power line. So, I moved the connections to other fan headers, and everything worked just fine. And the system has been completely stable ever since.