Zotac - GTX 460 SLI, up in smoke!

[aigomorla]

oh i know the EPS is an 8pin...

But i have seen people still force that plug in because they assume its like the PCI-E one which 2 side plugs split off, so they can just leave the 2 sides hanging.

Im not saying this is the case, it could of been the PSU shorting out a bad ground as well.

What im saying tho is, for that much damage to occur on the GPU, it would have to have been a VERY VERY VERY NASTY short.

And Trust me, ive shorted out a lot of cards in which i had to throw away.
It used to be a primary risk one did in the OLD gpu blocks, because of warping.

 

[Gulkorr]

if it was corsairs psu and there at fault they will replace the psu and gpu's over @ hardforums some guys H70 went all over his gtx 580 and h70 was no good and they replaced both paid for shipping and the whole deal.

 

[SickBeast]

So, OP, what's going on now? Have you contacted Gigabyte and Corsair?

I'm curious as to the outcome of this as I will be running GTX 460 SLI shortly, and I plan on overclocking both cards to 950mhz on the core.

 

[Seero]

So, OP, what's going on now? Have you contacted Gigabyte and Corsair?

I'm curious as to the outcome of this as I will be running GTX 460 SLI shortly, and I plan on overclocking both cards to 950mhz on the core.

I have been for GTX460 SLI for a while now. Either card ever go above 80 degree. The NB is hot and actually causes hangs, but that is a 1d10t user issue which the 1d10t has resolved by cleaning the bridge fan. No melt plastic, fire, shorts or sparks.

I too waiting for OP's next post.

 

[Pontius Dilate]

Any news from the OP? I'm interested in how this was resolved with Zotac & Gigabyte.

 

[SickBeast]

:whiste:

 

[mogman]

Finally received a fairly major update from Zotac late on Friday, 5/6.

They have been in touch with Gigabyte tech support trying to determine the root cause of the issue and they asked that I RMA the motherboard to Gigabyte for inspection as a precaution while Zotac inspects my cards.

They have approved my RMA on both cards, and I sent them out to Zotac in CA for further review this afternoon via UPS ground. Cards should arrive at Zotac on Friday, 5/13, so probably no more updates until next week.

I've been running the Corsair H50 and power supply in my system with a spare 8800GT with no issues since the original incident occurred.

 

[Pontius Dilate]

Finally received a fairly major update from Zotac late on Friday, 5/6.

They have been in touch with Gigabyte tech support trying to determine the root cause of the issue and they asked that I RMA the motherboard to Gigabyte for inspection as a precaution while Zotac inspects my cards.

They have approved my RMA on both cards, and I sent them out to Zotac in CA for further review this afternoon via UPS ground. Cards should arrive via at Zotac on Friday, 5/13, so probably no more updates until next week.

I've been running the Corsair H50 and power supply in my system with a spare 8800GT with no issues since the original incident occurred.

Fantastic! I would very much like to hear the resolution to this story so if you could keep the thread alive/apprised I (at least) would be grateful.

 

[Patrick Wolf]

Powering it up is one thing. I am questioning why the safety feature on the PSU did not kick in when it happened. Had the safety feature kicked in sooner or instantly then this problem might not happen.

Maybe the PSU was fine before and after but it had a faulty OCP/OVP that caused to not detect a possible problem. It is just my assumption to what happened, it may be right or it may be wrong.

As someone else pointed out. Antec says single rail PSU's don't have OCP on the 12v rail. If such is the case with his HX850, either the GPU or MB went bad which caused over-current so high it started an electrical fire. But maybe I misunderstand and such isn't possible.

 

[Bill Brasky]

That is excellent news. Please don't forget to update the thread when you hear back from Zotac. I've been pretty amazed with your whole story. I never knew something like this could even happen in a computer!

 

[Meghan54]

As someone else pointed out. Antec says single rail PSU's don't have OCP on the 12v rail. If such is the case with his HX850, either the GPU or MB went bad which caused over-current so high it started an electrical fire. But maybe I misunderstand and such isn't possible.

While Antec may be correct in some instances of single rail power supplies, even most of them do have some sort of OCP protection. Unfortunately, the OCP trip point has to be set higher than the rated output of that particular rail, in this case the +12V rail, which on a Corsair HX850 would be over 70A, the rated output.

So, it may indeed have OCP, it'd just be set much higher than what would be realistically necessary to prevent damage from a short.

Such is the problem with a single rail power supply.


But from what I've seen in the OP's pics, it almost looks to me like the motherboard was the primary failure point, not the video cards. Charring, smoke residue on the back of the lower card, the coolest running of the two cards. No charring, smoke residue on the front of the same card.

But there are no parts on the rear of the card to burn like that, only on the front. But the front of the card appears to have no heat/flame damage, so it almost appears to me like the PCI-e slot shorted, causing the damage.

I'd also be very interested to find out what Gigabyte finds during their examination of the mb.

 

[Patrick Wolf]

Dammit, man! Where's that update?

Maybe his place burned down...

 

[CFP]

Very interested to see how this turns out.

 

[styrafoam]

I wonder if Gigabyte will handle this RMA any different than all the rest and do something other that just update the bios and ship the board back?

 

[Kenmitch]

I wonder if Gigabyte will handle this RMA any different than all the rest and do something other that just update the bios and ship the board back?

Looking at the images I'd think thay once they got done laughing they would say something like the damage to the mb was caused by the graphics card(s) and isn't covered by the warranty.

Without all the parts in question in hand to examine it's hard to make a good judgement call tho.

At times like this having a motherboard and gpu(s) from the same company would be of great benefit!

 

[Pontius Dilate]

So ... updates?

 

[Bill Brasky]

I was wondering what happened to this thread.