torindkflt wrote:

started smoking and glowing hot.

Killed a couple of MSI FX-5200's, back in 2005 or so, when I was working at this shop, building computers for a living.
After 3 maby 4 dead cards with burned SMD resistors at the VGA output, I found out that the VGA cable had bented legs.
Just changed cable on the KVM switch, and moved on. Funny that burning SMD resistors are glowing bright white.

Yes, unfortunately.

I built a new rig a couple years ago and it worked perfectly for weeks. One day while I was playing a game I heard a staticky sound, the screen went black and I started smelling smoke. Shut off the power strip as soon as I could. The board was actually burned in a spot and to this day I can't figure out what went wrong as I double checked everything and all connections etc were fine. Just one of those wierd things I guess. The PSU was fine and is still in use as well as most of the other parts. Sent it in and ASUS rma'd it and sent me a new one so that was good.

dogchainx wrote:

As soon as the power hit the floppy a massive POOOF of magic smoke blew out the front and back of the floppy drive, and the floppy power cord melted all the way back to the PSU. The damn cable was moved over one pin worth.

And this is exactly why the ATX PSU guidelines recommend short circuit protection on the outputs!

I had a IBM ps2 color monitor go up in purple smoke. I immediately unplugged it and threw it outside where it continued to make god-awful sounds. It was a cool monitor for a few minuets...

I've experienced a smoking BIOS chip before. 😀

I was testing various scrapped P1/P2 boards for my my boss about 12 years ago, at the time my knowledge about that was limited. (Clearly so was his.)

The board powered on, but showed "Boot Lock BIOS". He handed me a jar of BIOS chips, and told me to find a match and plug it in. 😀

I found one which appeared to match and plugged it in....

and I'm sure you can figure out what happend next. 😀

Video card caught on fire in front of me once, wasn't mine but a client's. 2-inch visible flames on a 2007-ish AGP card, if I recall correctly. Also have witnessed a CRT imploding and releasing the "magic smoke" 😀

* Some 5 or 6 Western Digital 80GB Caviars (IDE) PCB smoking - one melted the entire IDE/power interface and fused it to the cables, we had to cut them. I've trashed the PSU and HDD of this one. It was always on the same model/family. I rememeber disassembling the PCB from the HDD chassis to take a look and it was always because of an overheating IC. They seemed very sensitive about being used with generic PSUs with bad/unregulated rails.

* Many melted IDE-to-SATA power adapters - Probably due to poor fittings/overall bad quality.

* One 1GB DDR400 (back in the days they were very expensive) toasting for not being correctly fit into the slot. Luckily, the board was an high-end Asus (I think it was a 939) and just that slot died. My one and only fault that leaded to a hardware destruction.

When I was pretty green on IT I tried fixing two generic, no-name PSUs by resoldering the burnt fuse, just to have both explode again into my face. At one, I had a very bright flash that scared the heck outta me and I fell from the chair I was on. 🤣 🤣

Dropcik wrote:

I had a IBM ps2 color monitor go up in purple smoke. I immediately unplugged it and threw it outside where it continued to make god-awful sounds. It was a cool monitor for a few minuets...

I had one "tuned" CRT (I didn't know frequency could be tinkered with from inside?) blow the glass cathode at the end (there's a small piece of glass as far as my memory goes) right in my face. Thankfully I got out of the situation only with a few scars (which were in cool places of my face 🤣 )

I had a super socket 7 mibo in the late 90's. I bought a usb cable and linked with wrong pins on it. Maybe it was connected to an IR pins. After getting some smoke from the case I found a burnt connector.

Well, not exactly fire but still somewhat funny nonetheless:

One morning back in 2000 or so I turned on my Pentium III PC only to have the power supply make a strange "pzzzzzzt" sound followed by a black smoke cloud that left a nice stain on the wall.

The strange part is that both the stain and the fan inside the PSU had greenish remains of an insect-like creature... 😲

Now, I didn't do an in-depth diagnosis since it was just a cheap power supply that I replaced right away, but based on the fact that around that time I had an invasion of grasshoppers in the garden my assumption is that one of them got in through the window and somehow decided to get into the fan area of the power supply. Then, when I tried to turn on the PC it probably got stuck there and caused some kind of short-circuit or something when it got torn into pieces by the spinning fan. 😵

Must - resist - urge - to make - stupid "bug" joke! ARRGGHHH 😉

Just comes to show that a little debugging can go a long ways 🤣

RIP Mr. Grasshopper 😵

Personally I've seen small roaches and beetles kill power supplies (and PCs) more than once.

No, but I keep a fire extinguisher near by just in case.

I had a friend whose video card caught fire once. On the online chat we were in, he typed "My video card is smoking" or something to that effect and promptly left.

The machine I'm typing this from used to have a USB+SATA combo card installed in it. One of those nasty chinese things with NEC chipsets. One day about five or so years ago I was sitting at the machine when Windows began freaking out and kept popping up the "DEVICE MALFUNCTION" and "HUB POWER EXCEEDED" notifications, followed by the smell of something burning. The machine didn't seem to be otherwise any more unstable than usual so I kept using it. The damage was finally evaluated a few months later when I pulled the machine out for dusting.

I remember back in about 2004 when I was repairing PC's at work, it was becoming quite common for Quantum Fireballs to die, but one
particular computer came in with the complaint that it had caught on fire. Upon closer inspection the Motor drive IC on the Quantum Fireball
had shat itself, and in the process spewed black carbon smoke all over the inside of the case.
It was quite hard to believe that that much damage could be caused by one tiny IC only.
It was also quite ironic that the HDD was named "Fireball".

Now you've got me all worried about my Fireball... 😳 😉