PCIe meltdown

NeghVar

NeghVar

2[H]4U
Joined
May 1, 2003
Messages
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About 5 - 6 years ago we received this surveillance system. It was one of ours. Never in my history of declaring myself a computer geek have I see this bad of a meltdown.
 

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I'm seriously surprised something else upstream of that slot didn't also burn up, that's a spectacular failure.

I wonder if the PCIe slot was removed and replaced and the soot cleaned up would make the board work again.
 
High resistance through the power connectors of the 16x pcie port. I've had similar issues twice now, once many years ago on an old Pentium 4 based HTPC (my wife came running into the room yelling the computers on fire, in which case it literally was) that had a card with additional VRM phases fitted to the motherboard for better power supply or some such rubbish, and once on the SATA power connector of an SSD - Once again in a HTPC oddly enough. The second time was no where near as dramatic though and the SSD survived.

It's like you get dust in the connectors, the resulting resistance creates heat and it's all over.
 
Mazzspeed said:
It's like you get dust in the connectors, the resulting resistance creates heat and it's all over.
Click to expand...

Naah, what usually happens is the copper contacts get tarnish or corrosion on them over time and that causes the resistance. Heat causes more resistance, which causes more heat and eventually you have fire.

I've had hard drives go on fire because the motor and head stack contacts got the same problem, which is exacerbated by the foam insulation which usually holds moisture and accelerates the process.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Naah, what usually happens is the copper contacts get tarnish or corrosion on them over time and that causes the resistance. Heat causes more resistance, which causes more heat and eventually you have fire.

I've had hard drives go on fire because the motor and head stack contacts got the same problem, which is exacerbated by the foam insulation which usually holds moisture and accelerates the process.
Click to expand...

Valid point. I didn't see any tarnishing, especially on the SSD as it wasn't that old TBH, but that stands to reason. ;)
 
High humidity can cause copper to tarnish rather quickly, depends on the environment.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
High humidity can cause copper to tarnish rather quickly, depends on the environment.
Click to expand...
Many of our customers are fast food restaurants. Some come back with a layer of grime that looks like it was too close to the deep fryer. More often though the CPU fan ceases and the CPU overheats.
 
NeghVar said:
Many of our customers are fast food restaurants. Some come back with a layer of grime that looks like it was too close to the deep fryer. More often though the CPU fan ceases and the CPU overheats.
Click to expand...

Yeah, been there. I do service calls for a local fast food restaurant chain and constantly have to repair things that have been sludged with grease. Wire runs above the ceilings are a nightmare because rodents eat the wire due to grease condensing on them.

Their back office PCs are a constant nightmare, have to be completely gutted and cleaned once a year.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Yeah, been there. I do service calls for a local fast food restaurant chain and constantly have to repair things that have been sludged with grease. Wire runs above the ceilings are a nightmare because rodents eat the wire due to grease condensing on them.

Their back office PCs are a constant nightmare, have to be completely gutted and cleaned once a year.
Click to expand...
found a fried mouse in a pc at a pizza place yet? "we dont know what happened. we were taking ordered and it just turned off!"
 
I found a mouse and a massive mouse nest in a PC one time. No idea how it got inside the case because there weren't any holes anywhere near big enough for it to get in. There was piss everywhere and it had actually corroded large pits several inches across in the case, DVD drive and hard drive. Fortunately the motherboard didn't take a hit.
 
that's what I found too! except the mouse got hungry and the hdd molex connector looked tasty.
 
I worked for Cargill Steel for a while. There were a few times I wondered how those PC's even worked anymore when I had opened a couple up to see about RAM upgrades the case was full of steel dust up to the level of the CPU heatsink; sometimes all you could see of the motherboard was the heatsinks. I very gently closed those back up and left them as they were. This was back around 2001.
 
Back in the late 90's, I worked in a tool and die factory where they used a program at each machine to keep track of their production for the day. Those PC's were really nasty. They had grease, coolant, and metal shavings all over them. They had Plexiglas cases around the computer, which helped a little, but that kept the heat trapped around the PC. I think I gave them good cleanings once a month or so. They actually ran pretty well for the most part, surprisingly enough.
 
pendragon1 said:
found a fried mouse in a pc at a pizza place yet? "we dont know what happened. we were taking ordered and it just turned off!"
Click to expand...

lol.... years ago I used to service a large city's colleges.

It was registration time and they called in a panic that their huge line printer went down and they had a long line of students waiting.
I looked inside the printer, no lie..... there was a chocolate donut in there blocking the print head.

Easy fix and huge laughs. :D:ROFLMAO: (although I'm guessing it was on purpose, somebody didn't want to work that day)

Also, nice failure there OP. that's a good one. I agree that it looks like open flames because of the soot.


.
 
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