Comments on: What’s That Burning Smell? It May Be Your Graphics Card

By: DOS_equis

DOS_equis — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 02:07:00 +0000

I once had a friend that asked me to look at his PC because it was acting up. When I opened the machine up I noticed the VGA fan sitting in the bottom, completely disconnected from the card. The card had become so hot that it softened the two solder joints (and any plastic mounting barbs) that the fan power wires were connected to, which loosened up the wires and let the fan fall. I was very surprised and told him I had never seen something like that before. Since he didn’t really use graphic intensive stuff we just switched the monitor over to the onboard chip.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 21:29:00 +0000

Wow. Either it is surprising to read a post on the same issue I posted about yesterday or it is eery to realize that behind my screen there are powerful algrithms figuring out everything I do on the web and feeding me what others think I would like to see… Either way it is weird!
Anyway, the exact same thing happened to me a couple of days ago: burning plastic smell and realizing it came from my pc while I was playing online. The difference is that I built a liquid cooled system for the GPU, CPU and chipset. I had to take everything apart and it is when I removed the add-ons to the GPU that I saw that one of the transistors had burned.
Good side of this is that I wanted to upgrade my video card but didn’t have the courage to take apart my system. It’s now done and I have a new card!

By: Bruce

Bruce — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:26:00 +0000

Super-gluing a new fan might be your only option if you’ve got an older computer and can’t purchase a new card because they’re not made any more. Been there, done that; it’s still working with the new fan.