this has never happened to me before.
a precursor to this is that i do alot've stress testing on my pc. my motherboard's northbridge has always ran hot (60'c at idle, and up to 75' at full load, even at the lowest voltage setting available), but the position of it was really bad and there was no way to fit any type of cooler on it with my h70 radiator in the way. so, i have always been weary about this board and wondered when something bad was going to happen. i was pretty much "waiting for the day" so to speak.
the other day i was testing some tighter ram settings and had prime95 running for a couple hours before i decided to take my dog on a walk.
when i got back i immediately smelled toxic fumes all in my house. i knew right away it was my pc. i walked into my room and saw that the light on the case was on, but no fans or anything were running. as if it wasn't already obvious enough that something was fried.
my motherboard had shutdown temperatures set (@ 60'c), so whatever happened somehow managed to bypass that safety feature. only my cpu was overclocked, and i barely had extra voltage going to it (like .15v).
the toxic smell in my house was too strong for me and my dog so i had to open all the windows and let it air out for awhile. 30 minutes later it still stank to high heaven in my room. for shits and grins i plugged the ps back in and hit the power button. in the 2 seconds my pc attempted to start up i heard 15 sparks and black smoke/dust shot out of my upper front exhaust fan. well... i was already running late to get to a show i had to play and didn't have time to mess with it.
so, i took it apart today. after removing everything from the mobo and removing it from the case i was able to access the northbridge heatsink. the northbridge heatsink on my board has a heatpipe that runs to another heatsink that lies over about 12 little voltage regulation chips. as it turns out, i think my chipset itself wasn't running hot. i bet these little bastards were actually sending heat back to my chipset. i guess is i could have glued a waterblock to these little guys, but i always assumed it was my nb running hot.
a precursor to this is that i do alot've stress testing on my pc. my motherboard's northbridge has always ran hot (60'c at idle, and up to 75' at full load, even at the lowest voltage setting available), but the position of it was really bad and there was no way to fit any type of cooler on it with my h70 radiator in the way. so, i have always been weary about this board and wondered when something bad was going to happen. i was pretty much "waiting for the day" so to speak.
the other day i was testing some tighter ram settings and had prime95 running for a couple hours before i decided to take my dog on a walk.
when i got back i immediately smelled toxic fumes all in my house. i knew right away it was my pc. i walked into my room and saw that the light on the case was on, but no fans or anything were running. as if it wasn't already obvious enough that something was fried.
my motherboard had shutdown temperatures set (@ 60'c), so whatever happened somehow managed to bypass that safety feature. only my cpu was overclocked, and i barely had extra voltage going to it (like .15v).
the toxic smell in my house was too strong for me and my dog so i had to open all the windows and let it air out for awhile. 30 minutes later it still stank to high heaven in my room. for shits and grins i plugged the ps back in and hit the power button. in the 2 seconds my pc attempted to start up i heard 15 sparks and black smoke/dust shot out of my upper front exhaust fan. well... i was already running late to get to a show i had to play and didn't have time to mess with it.
so, i took it apart today. after removing everything from the mobo and removing it from the case i was able to access the northbridge heatsink. the northbridge heatsink on my board has a heatpipe that runs to another heatsink that lies over about 12 little voltage regulation chips. as it turns out, i think my chipset itself wasn't running hot. i bet these little bastards were actually sending heat back to my chipset. i guess is i could have glued a waterblock to these little guys, but i always assumed it was my nb running hot.