My Titan X started on fire!

if you do try to restart the card... do it in a machine you dont care about incase it fries the motherboard/memory ect ect... dont want to make things even more expensive
 
i would slap the original cooler back on and send it in as is.....its evga for goodness sake....they just send out another refurb cause its pretty obvious a factory defect and not customer damaged
 
Bladestorm said:
What's the consensus. Should I RMA it as is, or try and flash the BIOS first?

Can anyone confirm a successful RMA with a modified BIOS?
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I can confirm, from the mouths/keyboards of EVGA representatives, that if they check it out and find that it doesn't have the correct model BIOS on the card, they WILL DENY your warranty.

Who knows what they will do when it gets back to their RMA department? Only the EVGA RMA department knows for sure.
 
well on the one hand..powering it up to just flash the bios is as you already stated seems possible. As expensive as those are i guess i would try....but i still dont believe they would deny it as is....i would probably flash it..if it works fine...if not send it in as is...have you tried pm'ing the rep here?
 
That deserves RMA even if it had the SC bios. That's nothing different than what they sell.
 
Bladestorm said:
Forgive my paint skills, but the flame shot straight up like this, and from that location on the card. I have a backplate on the card, so I don't yet know which side of the PCB it came from. I'm assuming the back, but I'll post actual pictures when I get them.


Titan_X.jpg



I forgot to mention the smell. As you can imagine it wasn't very pleasant.
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Too much voltage going through the GPU phases I'm guessing.

If you aren't able to get it to post so you can flash it back to stock... Then EVGA can't boot it up to check the bios. In which case you'll be fine. If you CAN get it to boot up and post... Swap the bios to stock. In which case you'll be fine (this is information directly from JacobF when customers on the forums have had similar issues).

EVGA will take care of you.

The only thing I would suggest would be to really try to swap the cooler back to stock after you find out if you can or can't change the bios. If you can't swap the cooler, talk to EVGA and I'm sure they'll make an exception for you.
 
1) Don't put that back in your computer.

2) Don't lie to them, tell them everything up front and be honest.

Chances are with a problem like that they will do right by you, flashing the SC BIOS won't make a component fail like that.
 
Rizen said:
1) Don't put that back in your computer.

2) Don't lie to them, tell them everything up front and be honest.

Chances are with a problem like that they will do right by you, flashing the SC BIOS won't make a component fail like that.
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I agree. Call them up and explain the situation to them. I bet they take care of you, almost no questions asked - especially if you send them the photos of the failed cap.

That said, if they want the stock BIOS on it when it makes it back to them, plug it into an old system and flash that shit back on there.

If you need a throwaway system to do this with, you could probably find one for cheap on Craigslist, or failing that, just buy one of those really cheap AM1 setups that Fry's has all the time. Spending $50 to get your $1000 video card replaced would still put you $950 ahead, and would net you some spare parts. I can always find something to do with spare PC parts.
 
If you are going to put that card back into a system to try and flash the BIOS, at least for the sake of all that's precious, use PCB cleaning fluid to remove the carbonisation and other gunk off the board to prevent random stuff from shorting out.
 
The important part is that you tell us if the fps improved while it was on fire? Are you using Afterburner?

Kidding aside, I agree that being up front with vega would be your best bet. They should be curious about what caused this.
 
I was able to flash it back to the stock BIOS, and it's currently in UPS's hands on its way to EVGA. I'm surprised it went as smoothly as it did. No additional fires. ;)
 
The SC BIOS is still within NVIDIA's own power specifications, as far as I'm aware. Regardless on whether or not the chip was binned for a Superclocked version, I don't think there is any way the BIOS itself could have caused this fire. It could have simply been a manufacturing defect.
 
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Bladestorm said:
Here's what you all were waiting for. Sorry for the lackluster quality.

How safe is it to power back on?

IMG_2013_Large.jpg


IMG_2015_Large.jpg


IMG_2016_Large.jpg
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just for fun, how about someone circle and label all the damaged components and maybe even a theory of what started the burn out.
 
That is definitely a capacitor in the power phase that blew up, and the fire was hot enough to start melting the surrounding MOSFETs. Like cyclone3d on the previous page said, there was probably a short in the associated VRM that caused a power spike big enough for the cap to fail catastrophically.

There is actually a paper from 2001 that I found which talks about how a MLCC like that can fail if there is any error in the manufacturing process. Like I said, there was probably a manufacturing defect that caused this to happen.

http://www.calce.umd.edu/whats_new/2001/Ceramic.pdf

"Due to the large amount of energy stored by capacitors, internal shorts resulting from defects can cause explosions and dramatic temperature increases, which not only destroy the MLCC, and any evidence of root cause, but can also damage surrounding components, the printed board, adjacent circuit card assemblies, and may even lead to fires. Over the last eighteen months, CALCE laboratory services have assisted a number of companies in finding MLCC root cause failures."
 
Rizen said:
1) Don't put that back in your computer.

2) Don't lie to them, tell them everything up front and be honest.

Chances are with a problem like that they will do right by you, flashing the SC BIOS won't make a component fail like that.
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Honestly, this.

be straight and ask them to do right. This shouldnt have happened and you spent huge cash...

ASUS tried to screw people over and once it gained enough attention, they folded like a deck of cards.
 
what i learned from this is keep everything at stock and this probably does not happen.
 
Nauseous said:
what i learned from this is keep everything at stock and this probably does not happen.
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Nah... The way those caps blew, it was probably a manufacturing defect. I'm sure it was just a matter of time.
 
Yea the card would just shut down from over heating long before it got hot enough to spontaneously combust from temps alone. It sounds like it had to be an electrical issue or defect in the card or cooler itself...
 
How long does EVGA usually take? They've had my Titan since last Thursday, and still haven't shipped out a replacement card.
 
Fixall said:
Nah... The way those caps blew, it was probably a manufacturing defect. I'm sure it was just a matter of time.
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MasayaSoro said:
Yea the card would just shut down from over heating long before it got hot enough to spontaneously combust from temps alone. It sounds like it had to be an electrical issue or defect in the card or cooler itself...
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Yup.

No GPU in any of my rigs (laptops included) are left at stock. Hell I even overclocked the GTS 350M in my Toshiba Satellite that had pretty shitty cooling and would never run below 85C when gaming. And to this day I haven't blown anything up (yet, knock on wood :D).
 
MasayaSoro said:
Yea the card would just shut down from over heating long before it got hot enough to spontaneously combust from temps alone. It sounds like it had to be an electrical issue or defect in the card or cooler itself...
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Automatic shut down is definitely in the case of GPU itself. I am not so sure if this is also in the case of VRMs which was the reason of the card death here? VRMs are really fantastic in standing the power and temperature loads but they constantly operate in the heavy duty region, especially with overclocking. One can speculate that the card failure here could be caused by a random problem but also by insufficient cooling of the VRM (e.g. lack of good touch between the cooler and VRM).
 
willx said:
Jesus... never seen a PC part get caught on fire... thats dangerous
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Though very low, probability of devilish happenings is non-zero. This was very rare case maybe temperature inside the box was unusually high. Note the card was running overclocked which is outside normal operational mode and (I think) not covered by the manufacturer's responsibility.

I, who is saying this, am running dual Titan X overclocked to the max with special BIOS mod where @1500MHz power consumption peaks are over 400 W per card. But I have watercooling, backplates plus water and backplate temperature monitoring :eek:.
 
Bladestorm said:
How long does EVGA usually take? They've had my Titan since last Thursday, and still haven't shipped out a replacement card.
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They had my card for over a week before they shipped out a replacement. Check the RMA status on their website.
 
Apoxi said:
They had my card for over a week before they shipped out a replacement. Check the RMA status on their website.
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I have, and I can confirmation that they received it on the morning of the 7th. However, they conveniently list the received date as the 11th.
 
Bladestorm said:
I have, and I can confirmation that they received it on the morning of the 7th. However, they conveniently list the received date as the 11th.
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Yes clearly they are trying to screw up and delay this whole process by marking the card as received on the 11th :rolleyes: The 7th is a Thursday and they marked it as received into their RMA process on the following Monday. Taking a one or two business days to process incoming boxes is normal for a lot of companies. You should be more patient considering this is a $1000 card you arguably voided the warranty on.
 
Ocellaris said:
Yes clearly they are trying to screw up and delay this whole process by marking the card as received on the 11th :rolleyes: The 7th is a Thursday and they marked it as received into their RMA process on the following Monday. Taking a one or two business days to process incoming boxes is normal for a lot of companies. You should be more patient considering this is a $1000 card you arguably voided the warranty on.
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I apologize for offending you Ocellaris.
 
Bladestorm said:
I apologize for offending you Ocellaris.
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I think they're dealing with a massive backlog of work from the holidays. EVGA employees get off from just before Xmas time to just after New Year's Day. Folks are still ordering and returning stuff all the time during EVGA's "vacation", so that's my guess, anyways.
 
Bladestorm said:
I have, and I can confirmation that they received it on the morning of the 7th. However, they conveniently list the received date as the 11th.
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I worked in QA/support/receiving for a company during college. We were delivered 20+ large crates of packages every day from the post office. It can take a little while to process everything once they receive it.
 
tungt88 said:
I think they're dealing with a massive backlog of work from the holidays. EVGA employees get off from just before Xmas time to just after New Year's Day. Folks are still ordering and returning stuff all the time during EVGA's "vacation", so that's my guess, anyways.
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Rizen said:
I worked in QA/support/receiving for a company during college. We were delivered 20+ large crates of packages every day from the post office. It can take a little while to process everything once they receive it.
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It's all good. I called them up, they apologized for the delay, and got the replacement shipped out.
 
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