PSU Chemical/Burn Smell

Poppo

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Hey [H]ardForum,

Yesterday morning I woke up to a burning/chemical smell in my apartment. I jumped out of bed a ran right to my rig to find that 3 out of the 6 cards were still powered on (the other 3 were powered off). After doing some debugging, I found that my right PSU was causing the smell and that the SATA input on the back had stopped working completely. Luckily, there was another unused SATA input right next to the fried one and it is now back up and running great.

I understand that using SATA to power my GPU's is not a good practice; however, they are mining risers that support 300Volts. I have owned this rig for 3 years now and never have had any problems with it. I give the rig breaks and clean/dust it often.

I am using EVGA 750W 80+ Gold PSU's. I heard that these are the top of the line for GPU mining but it is still producing a chemical smell. Does anyone have any suggestions for me? Should I try and get rid of the SATA risers completely? Should I purchase a new PSU or keep going and just avoid the smell? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.
 
How many risers are you powering off one sata cable from the PSU and what video cards are you using? You really should be using one sata cable from psu to one riser IMO if you can't avoid sata connectors and not use them at all if you're running AMD cards since they will burn up.

I would probably stop using it right now because you might wake up (or not) tomorrow morning to this until you figure out your situation:

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In terms of powered risers, 12v pcie > molex > sata.

Sata is terrible for supplying high current.

Ditch those and get 12v pcie risers. Pcie splitters are far safer if needed.
 
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How many risers are you powering off one sata cable from the PSU and what video cards are you using? You really should be using one sata cable from psu to one riser IMO if you can't avoid sata connectors and not use them at all if you're running AMD cards since they will burn up.

I would probably stop using it right now because you might wake up (or not) tomorrow morning to this until you figure out your situation:

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One SATA cable outputs and supplies 3 cards. I agree and think I need to ditch the SATA connectors. Thank you for your reply.
In terms of powered risers, 12v pcie > molex > sata.

Sata is terrible for supplying high current.

Ditch those and get 12v pcie risers. Pcie splitters are far safer if needed.
I will try out the 12v PCIE risers. Do you have any suggested risers that I should try out? Thank you.
 
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One SATA cable outputs and supplies 3 cards.

Oof, I can smell the melting insulation from here... Edit: You're using probably double, possibly close to triple the rated max current load for those connectors, depending on how much those GPUs draw from the pcie slot.
 
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