My Titan X started on fire!

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Bladestorm

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 10, 2006
Messages
1,232
So there I was trying to enjoy some Fallout 4 when all of the sudden my computer shuts off. It turns itself back on a couple of seconds later, and I hear a pop. I look over at my case and through my side window I see a flame shoot up from my Titan X. I immediately kill the power, and proceed to remove the card. It's hot as hell, but no noticeable damage.

Here's the part where I start kicking myself. The card was a vanilla EVGA model. Shortly after I installed the ACX 2.0+ Cooler kit, I flashed the card with the EVGA "SC" bios. I never overclocked it beyond that, and it's been running that way since May without issue.

Am I screwed as far as my warranty is concerned?
 
That's uh...not good. I know EVGA used to allow after market coolers, and you might be OK if you still have one original BIOS. The best thing you can do is contact them and be honest about what happened. Given the severity of the failure, they might be willing to trade it in for you just so they can check it out even if they won't cover it. Also you have to have the original cooler remounted before you send it in.

Posting pics would be awesome if you're able.
 
Oldie said:
Posting pics would be awesome if you're able.
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I'll take some pics of what I find when I reinstall the factory cooler. As of right now there's nothing to see.

FRZ said:
Did you register the card?
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Ugh..........no, I never did. :( I never registered a EVGA 750 Ti I RMA'd a while back, and they didn't care. Funny thing, the refurb they sent me back ended up being a shelf spare that I didn't use till now. It has artifacts on screen when using Nvidia drivers. If I uninstall them and use the windows default drivers it's fine.
 
That really, really sucks....

But why you wouldn't register a thousand dollar card is beyond me.

Hopefully they'll be cool with an RMA. I reckon they will honestly.... Especially if you mention FIRE lol
 
Bladestorm said:
So there I was trying to enjoy some Fallout 4 when all of the sudden my computer shuts off. It turns itself back on a couple of seconds later, and I hear a pop. I look over at my case and through my side window I see a flame shoot up from my Titan X. I immediately kill the power, and proceed to remove the card. It's hot as hell, but no noticeable damage.

Here's the part where I start kicking myself. The card was a vanilla EVGA model. Shortly after I installed the ACX 2.0+ Cooler kit, I flashed the card with the EVGA "SC" bios. I never overclocked it beyond that, and it's been running that way since May without issue.

Am I screwed as far as my warranty is concerned?
Click to expand...

If you've flashed to an unsupported BIOS and installed an unsupported cooler (whether it fit or not), I'm betting EVGA's going to SOL you.

They might not. But...
 
best bet is to contact them to rma it. you can tell them it has an aftermarket cooler but put the original back on to send it to them. I wouldn't worry about the BIOS.
 
Chas said:
If you've flashed to an unsupported BIOS and installed an unsupported cooler (whether it fit or not), I'm betting EVGA's going to SOL you.

They might not. But...
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It's EVGA's own cooler, and it is supported. They just say you need to remove it, and install the original before sending it in for RMA.
 
mnewxcv said:
I wouldn't worry about the BIOS.
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That's going to be hard for me to do. If there's a silver lining in this it's that for the brief moment after my PC restarted itself it was displaying video in POST. I'm going to try it in a different PC and see if I can get it to work long enough to flash the BIOS back to stock.
 
Not sure why people are saying you are out of luck if you didn't register with EVGA. Not registering it won't affect warranty at all. You would just start a guest RMA with evga and they probably won't even ask you for a receipt since the card hasn't even been out for a year.


The only thing I'd be worried about is the bios, they usually tell you that you must flash to the original bios before RMA and to put the original cooler back in.

Is there anyway that you can boot up the card and then install the bios after it cools down completely?
 
Subscribed to see how this turns out. Sucks if the card can't be flashed back to stock. Then again I presume the OP is fine losing a $1K GPU if he was taking the risk of flashing it.
 
Bladestorm said:
That's going to be hard for me to do. If there's a silver lining in this it's that for the brief moment after my PC restarted itself it was displaying video in POST. I'm going to try it in a different PC and see if I can get it to work long enough to flash the BIOS back to stock.
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you are saying it showed post video when it auto rebooted before u killed the power? (it was showing video while on fire...?)
 
mnewxcv said:
you are saying it showed post video when it auto rebooted before u killed the power? (it was showing video while on fire...?)
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This seems plausible. We recently had a light ballast at work go up in smoke and the light stayed on for a bit :)
 
I know evga are generally cool and their support is better than the rest. You could even call them 24/7 I believe.
 
mnewxcv said:
you are saying it showed post video when it auto rebooted before u killed the power? (it was showing video while on fire...?)
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It happened quickly, but yes. The fire itself lasted only a second or two. The flame was maybe a half inch wide by a little over an inch tall.
 
LOL this is why I never go EVGA. You hear way too many horror stories like this, when you have been around long enough.
 
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.
 
Titan X performs fantastic when on fire. Why are you worried?

On a serious note they will set you right. Just make the same thread on their forums. They are super helpful people.
 
Bladestorm said:
Is there any chance my PSU may have caused this? (or Fallout 4 :D)
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If the PSU is still OK, the card was running for months, and there was nothing special happening recently it would point to just a random failure of an element. Seeing photo with texact place may help with diagnosis.
 
So much misinformation and FUD in this thread.

horrorshow said:
But why you wouldn't register a thousand dollar card is beyond me.
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You don't need to register the card for warranty. If you register it, your warranty is 3 years from date of purchase. If you don't, your warranty is 3 years from date of manufacture. It's that simple.

Bladestorm said:
If there's a silver lining in this it's that for the brief moment after my PC restarted itself it was displaying video in POST. I'm going to try it in a different PC and see if I can get it to work long enough to flash the BIOS back to stock.
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You don't need to even display video to be able to re-flash the stock BIOS.

If it doesn't display video, force your iGPU as the primary display output in the BIOS. As long as the card can be recognized in BIOS flashing tools (the GPU can be toast and still be recognized), you can flash it. Whether reversion to stock (without informing eVGA) is ethically sound is up to you.

Chas said:
If you've flashed to an unsupported BIOS and installed an unsupported cooler (whether it fit or not),
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eVGA's cool with aftermarket coolers (even non-eVGA/ACX) as long as the original is outfitted back during time of RMA and damage was not caused by the aftermarket cooler.
AFAIK they are generally not cool with flashing non-stock BIOSes on their single-BIOS cards. Not sure about their dual-BIOS cards.

NukeDukem said:
LOL this is why I never go EVGA. You hear way too many horror stories like this, when you have been around long enough.
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? eVGA customer service hasn't even been involved yet.

It's a reference Titan X and eVGA has the biggest market share in the United States for these cards.


In general I would avoid flashing BIOSes on GM200.
 
Ocellaris said:
Aren't all of the Titan X cards pure reference design?
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They are. But I don't know if they are build by partner companies following the nvidia reference design or by nvidia chosen manufacturers like quadro and tesla cards.

That said, I had 3 EVGA Titan X cards die on me. The story so far:

Bought a EVGA Titan X on release day last year. The card died after 3 months, driver crashes in games. First a few and far between, later every 10 minutes.

The replacement card I got was new. I don't know why, maybe they had no refurbished Titan X cards but it was brand new, and it came in DoA. The card died right away within 5 minutes of usage.

The third EVGA Titan X worked great and despite having a very low ASIC rating it was one hell of an overclocker. I got a bit over 1400Mhz stable with the stock BIOS and no voltage tweaks. I'm sure that card would have done 1450+.

And while it was 100% stable in every game and benchmark it caused display driver crashes on the desktop, mostly when opening video files. It didn't matter what player, what kind of content or codec, hardware or software encoding, trying to play video material crashed the driver.

Thats my EVGA story, never again. I have a Zotac Titan X now that is working fine.
 
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
 
That is a capacitor that fried. It might be a dead short now from the looks of the carbon it left in its place.

Guessing that the VRM associated with that capacitor shorted out.

It may still work under an idle state so you can flash back to the stock BIOS, but not sure if I would try it.

I personally will not even try using a card that is visibly shorted as it could possibly mess up the motherboard or power supply.
 
I'm with the above... I would never put that back in my system. Chances of frying other components is high. Fire and electronics are a no no.
 
Yeah, If you have a cheap test-bench you could try it out on, flash the BIOS, and try for an RMA. don't put it on your main rig.

Godamn, now I'm really concerned about my cards....
 
I would just contact evga and start the rma. That card is toast.
 
I've got some test systems I can try it on at work tomorrow. I'd rather not start a fire, but what other choice do I have? I need to reflash that BIOS.
 
Bladestorm said:
I've got some test systems I can try it on at work tomorrow. I'd rather not start a fire, but what other choice do I have? I need to reflash that BIOS.
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Starting a fire is the LEAST of your concerns. A little electrical short may kill the card, but start a full-fledged fire is not likely. Keep an extinguisher nearby, and the chances of it becoming physically dangerous are slim. The only times computers start fires is when they are unattended and the arc is allowed to go on without anyone pulling the plug.
 
And hey, if it completely fries the video card EVGA will never know about the VBIOS!
 
If temps were within reason I can't see evga caring. The SC bios is a pretty common flash.
 
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?
 
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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Honestly given the problem I doubt they'll even try to power it up to confirm. Either way I'm still sticking with my honest is the best policy opinion, just tell them everything. From the look of the pics, I would guess that nothing you did had anything at all to do with what happened, but I'm far from an expert.
 
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