Unbeknownst to me, I was working with a PC that had a broken USB port. I plugged a device into it, and shorted the pins together. The PC immediately locked up. Now, it won't POST at all. There was no smoke... nothing on the board LOOKS damaged. Did it fry the chipset immediately? The board is less than a year old... Gigabyte M57SLI-S4
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Ludicrous gibs!
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Re: Can a USB short fry a motherboard?
I had a customer who kept installing the USB connector in backwards. This shorted the pins and instantly crowbard the power supply. Nothing was smoked when she did it (twice).
Evidently the + voltage gets shorted directly to shield. Some PSU handle it better than others. -
Re: Can a USB short fry a motherboard?
Taking a closer look at the connector, the pins did not touch each other, but the two center pins bent over to the sheild. It's a cheap PSU... I'll try replacing it with another.Ludicrous gibs!
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Re: Can a USB short fry a motherboard?
Usb sockets should be fully short circuit protected - its part of the USB spec.
....unfortunately most of them aren't.
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Re: Can a USB short fry a motherboard?
i see lots of cheapie boards with jumpers in place of fuses,polyfuses,ect.
do they save enough to pay for the judgement when they get sued for a fire that started for lack of a protective device?Comment
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Re: Can a USB short fry a motherboard?
very common for cheapo mobo / cards do not make extra protection....
lol
admit in sch tt i often nth to do, use a metal ruler to short the usb ports, sparks came out .. den having a message... USB power .... exceeded.. lolComment
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Re: Can a USB short fry a motherboard?
Originally posted by ant3202
Any chance of that again, this time in English?
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Re: Can a USB short fry a motherboard?
A properly designed board shouldn't fail due to a USB bus short. Whether it's protected by Polyfuses or regular ones. You might lose the pair of ports if it uses a regular fuse, and Polyfuses are resettable, after you pull the power for a bit..Comment
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Re: Can a USB short fry a motherboard?
There shouldn't even be fuses needed, USB ports are supposed to be current limited.Comment
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Re: Can a USB short fry a motherboard?
yes.Originally posted by Harvey
by polyfuses!Comment
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Re: Can a USB short fry a motherboard?
I've been through a USB short before. It didn't smell very nice but my board still worked and obviously the USB section of the board didn't.
Have a look here for more details.
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=3036
Thanks.Don't find love, let love find you. That's why its called falling in love, because you don't force yourself to fall, you just fall. - AnonymousComment
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Hi beginner here, so I'm not sure of I've done this right 😅 trying to diagnose my laptop's motherboard (dax31mb1aa0 rev a). I don't quite know how to read the schematic, so I'm attaching the pictures of the motherboard and the measurements.
I was attempting to measure resistance to GND on inductors. I disconnected motherboard and used "continuity testing" setting on my multimeter. I put black probe to Ground & red probe on an inductor. Did I measure this right? Am I correct to think that 0.3 ohm measurement indicates a short circuit? Thank you for your help!... -
Hello everybody,
One of my friends brought me his brother's laptop to repair, I'm the third person who put the hands on this laptop (he tried to convince his brother to take it to me for the ram upgrade, dust cleanup and thermal paste replacement but he wanted to make it to his university friend... sorry if I say that, but we saw the result).
The laptop is a Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 15ARH05 with AMD Ryzen CPU and Nvidia GPU.
I'm going to give a quick recap of what happened before I got this laptop for repair to make clear the situation.
A friend of his brother... -
the comon problem they say , the charger will shut off power once plugged to laptop , i dont have battery, its long gone ago , i use it for backup with adapter and vga port to external monitor(yes no screen lcd) in case my desktop needs fix . one thing for sure i could say the clr resistor - r010 beeps ,short at both sides , the checked all the coils , the 3 coils together gives all of them beeps short along with their respective capacitors . i dont have voltage ampere injection dc machine as in videos i have seen they see where its getting hot and they remove the short and replace components... -
Hi All, I have a 9th Gen Dell Optiplex micro PC motherboard which doesn't power on. When I connect the motherboard with power adapter, it goes into safe mode and turns off. So from info I have gathered online, it looks like there is a short circuit on the motherboard. So can you guys help me with figuring out the issue?
I am new to electronics repair, so my queries could be naive but I am ready to learn.
So I have a multimeter and a solder with me. But I can try to get a variable voltage power supply with a thermal camera as well. From what I seen online, best way is... -
Does anyone know what pins i need to short to power on the Dell XPS 13 9315 clamshell? I have just the main board and I would like to get into the BIOS to enable boot on AC. Can anyone help me?07-27-2025, 10:23 PM
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