Never saw that damage before, wow...

If they are rusty, they where exposed to water which is bad

candle_86 wrote:

If they are rusty, they where exposed to water which is bad

That was my first thought: incompetent water cooling by previous owner. But there is no other evidence of damage or residue elsewhere so I think it's the manufacturing issue mentioned in the article.

I've heard of this before. These generations of boards have problems of their own (for instance weak VRMs for CPUs with higher TDP or the pins inside the Intel boards).

Chances are that humidity was the cause not a leaky block or bad loop, in some parts of the world this is unavoidable. As long as board manufacturers continue to cut corners quality wise there will always be problems with each generation of hardware and even more so when there is design faults or is intended to fail like Apple products.

nforce4max wrote:

Chances are that humidity was the cause not a leaky block or bad loop, in some parts of the world this is unavoidable. As long as board manufacturers continue to cut corners quality wise there will always be problems with each generation of hardware and even more so when there is design faults or is intended to fail like Apple products.

That's one of the reasons a lot of boards are conformal coated now, and maybe a feature to look for when shopping for boards anymore.

Guys that's a feature. Kids nowadays have fancy LEDs and motherboard designs.. we customized through science.