MSI board caught fire

[jphipps]

Is it possible for a bad cap to cause a motherboard to ignite? My wife was in our office the other day when she heard a noise at the kids computer and when she looked she saw fire on the inside. She was able to blow it out and luckily nothing else happened. It looked like the fire started at a capicitor at the bottom of the board, it was burnt pretty bad. Anyone else seen anything like this before? I have worked with computers for 13 years and have had a server running in the house for the past 5 years round the clock with no problems. I am just trying to figure out if this is a possibility or not.

Thanks

[dood]

Re: MSI board caught fire

Usually this will happen if a cap goes and shorts out one of the MOSFETs. Then the MOSFET overheats and melts, possibly catching fire/smoking... Was it actually the cap that caught fire, or something else? It is definately possible...

[jphipps]

Re: MSI board caught fire

It is hard for me to say exactly what caught fire. I have included two pictures for you to check out. In the second picture where you see the mounting hold for the motherboard there is a smaller hole where there was a capacitor, it is also in the picture midway up the motherboard to the side of it.

Thanks

[dood]

Re: MSI board caught fire

Holy Cow! can't really tell where the fire originated, not being familiar with the board, myself. Perhaps someone who has the same board can look at theirs and see what is in that area....

I see it was burning through the other side, since it blackened the mobo tray quite well, too. Stick a fork in 'er, she's done!

[PeteS in CA]

Re: MSI board caught fire

Any tantalum caps in that area? Sun stopped using tantalum caps in the late 90s due to fiery failures.

[Mustang]

Re: MSI board caught fire

That looks like it shorted out on the lower right standoff.

[Topcat]

Re: MSI board caught fire

That'll buff right out.................

If I had to render a guess of the cause, I'd say it grounded to the case, or maybe the power supply spiked and send a nasty surge through it.... I see it was by the USB header, but I can't tell the origin (what chip actually started burning). I had an Iwill DVD266u-RN do a similar thing when I plugged in a USB scanner. It cooked the southbridge and a bunch of stuff around it, but it didn't burn THAT much. Either way, thats not normal in any way. I've seen boards go up in smoke on many occasions, but nothing on that scale!

[Rainbow]

Re: MSI board caught fire

I'd try to clean the smoke from the board - that might show where the fire started.
I found a better photo (although not the same PCB version).

[jphipps]

Re: MSI board caught fire

I looked closer and it appears that the worst of the fire is from the cap to the right of the bottom right standoff. I guess it shorted out some how.

Thanks for all of the help guys, I really appreciate it.

[willawake]

Re: MSI board caught fire

here's another one, blown cap this time



i would be interested to know what msi say. should be a new board hopefully. i dont think you would see that level of failure again though. thanks for the pics, it was certainly an eye opener

[MD Willington]

Re: MSI board caught fire

I had charcoal on my K7S5A.. but nothing that bad... Next month is the MSI settlement, with pictures like this online, MSI may end up over a barrel..