So yeah, sad but true story.
I was gaming and about to take a break when suddenly boom, a puff of white smoke, an horrible smell and the PC shuts down (and proceeds to reboot but I didn't let it - I shut down the power at the plug). Following my nose I couldn't find anything wrong with the PSU nor, at first, with the GPU. However I found the smell to be very strong around the CPU cooler area. So I take everything apart, only to find that while the CPU heatsink stinks, all looks absolutely perfect in that area and there is in fact no unusual smell (it's just the heatsink that absorbed the smoke, a Noctua NH-U12P). So back to the GPU then and yep, there it is:
I monitor my temps constantly so I know my temps were fine even when it happened. Well... all my temps except the GPU VRMs since I have no way of measuring that. And while it could just be a manufacturing defect, I think I know what just happened and it might be entirely my fault.
I bought this card originally http://www.inno3d.com/images/products/x-large/products_id_200_1.jpg and since the cooling sucked (I don't overclock btw, just running everything at default), noisy, hot, core frequency fluctuating between 1000 and 1265 (small factory OC) - I slapped a Prolimatech MK-26 onto it and called it a day. After that, core frequency never dropped below 1265 in game since the temp of the core was always so damn low - but then that also means the card was sucking a lot of power and the VRMs must have been obviously pretty damn hot (but I assumed this would never be an issue at such low clocks).
My card came with some heatsink for the VRMs as you can see here : http://i.imgur.com/lLLZUTo.jpg
I left it on since installing the VRM heatsinks from Prolimatech is such a hassle. I also figured it would be absolutely fine that way (and it was, for 7 months of very heavy usage), since after all the card isn't heavily overclocked or anything. With the stock cooler, there is actually quite a bit of air being blown at the VRMs. With my Prolimatech set up, not really any. So I'm pretty positive that is the problem - VRMs got too hot for too long.
I read some stories about people running into similar issues with the Kraken G10 cooler (i.e. super cool core and super hot VRMs).
tldr: I learned about the importance of VRM cooling on big GPUs, the hard way.
*Card is still under warranty and the stock cooler had no stickers or anything so it will look just like new when I send it back to them, shouldn't be a big problem. Still this sucks and we don't really know much about Pascal yet so I'll just buy another ti (no I can't wait ) and sell this one once it's fixed.
I was gaming and about to take a break when suddenly boom, a puff of white smoke, an horrible smell and the PC shuts down (and proceeds to reboot but I didn't let it - I shut down the power at the plug). Following my nose I couldn't find anything wrong with the PSU nor, at first, with the GPU. However I found the smell to be very strong around the CPU cooler area. So I take everything apart, only to find that while the CPU heatsink stinks, all looks absolutely perfect in that area and there is in fact no unusual smell (it's just the heatsink that absorbed the smoke, a Noctua NH-U12P). So back to the GPU then and yep, there it is:
I monitor my temps constantly so I know my temps were fine even when it happened. Well... all my temps except the GPU VRMs since I have no way of measuring that. And while it could just be a manufacturing defect, I think I know what just happened and it might be entirely my fault.
I bought this card originally http://www.inno3d.com/images/products/x-large/products_id_200_1.jpg and since the cooling sucked (I don't overclock btw, just running everything at default), noisy, hot, core frequency fluctuating between 1000 and 1265 (small factory OC) - I slapped a Prolimatech MK-26 onto it and called it a day. After that, core frequency never dropped below 1265 in game since the temp of the core was always so damn low - but then that also means the card was sucking a lot of power and the VRMs must have been obviously pretty damn hot (but I assumed this would never be an issue at such low clocks).
My card came with some heatsink for the VRMs as you can see here : http://i.imgur.com/lLLZUTo.jpg
I left it on since installing the VRM heatsinks from Prolimatech is such a hassle. I also figured it would be absolutely fine that way (and it was, for 7 months of very heavy usage), since after all the card isn't heavily overclocked or anything. With the stock cooler, there is actually quite a bit of air being blown at the VRMs. With my Prolimatech set up, not really any. So I'm pretty positive that is the problem - VRMs got too hot for too long.
I read some stories about people running into similar issues with the Kraken G10 cooler (i.e. super cool core and super hot VRMs).
tldr: I learned about the importance of VRM cooling on big GPUs, the hard way.
*Card is still under warranty and the stock cooler had no stickers or anything so it will look just like new when I send it back to them, shouldn't be a big problem. Still this sucks and we don't really know much about Pascal yet so I'll just buy another ti (no I can't wait ) and sell this one once it's fixed.
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