Question about my exploding PC

[Neon Ignition]

When mine blew and it took out the motherboard and one of the RAM sticks that turned out to be from a power surge. I swapped in a power extension strip that was anti-surge and nothing has happened since. Seems the most likely cause as you'd need an insane amount of high tech to overload the PSU without it being faulty.

[charlesr]

He seems very cagey in actually telling us what spec the machine is. I have a feeling its a Cray Supercomputer with floruinert waterfall cooling running off a 200w AT PSU with a 3amp fuse.

Or a 50A fuse

[vanpeebles]

Or a 50A fuse

But the shed is still there?

[Dogg Thang]

You can download CPUz and screen grab the details there

Here are the highlights...







Anyway, is the general consensus that it's highly unlikely that the hard drives are part of the problem...?

[vanpeebles]

What else is fitted? What is the cooling? Total drives? Soundcard?

[Zaki]

Have you tried a UPS? (hides)

Your PC really is like a Spinal Tap drummer

[Dogg Thang]

What else is fitted? What is the cooling? Total drives? Soundcard?

What am I, IT?! I have no idea. Under Sound in my device manager it says both AMD high definition audio device and Strix sound card. No idea about how I would find out about something like cooling. Other than that, keyboard, mouse, webcam. The usual. It had a blu-ray drive but that blew the last time so it has been disconnected since then. Oh, a monitor and a cintiq and those giant speakers too.

[vanpeebles]

Take the side off and show us a photo

[Zaki]

I think he receives emails from the IMF which self destruct after he reads them.

[Zaki]

Serious question. Is everything seated properly (GPU, CPU) Heatsink not touching anything it shouldn't be touching?

Is the motherboard mounted properly and not touching the case?

[MartyG]

Here are the highlights...

Even with the six sata drives the mobo supports plugged in and an overclocked CPU, I'd expect a 750 watt PSU to be plenty to power that system. The FirePro W5100 is an older generation AMD card so would be pulling around 250 watts maxed out, but there should be headroom on a 750w PSU. There are no BIOS updates for the mobo that are directly power related but there have been an awful lot of revisions to do with stability - you could try a BIOS update but it probably wouldn't change anything.

So without being able to inspect the machine, I'm out of ideas ... rodent investation chewing through wires? Grieved forum users remotely hacking your bios and overloading your system maybe?

Difficult to believe it's just bad luck again - but perhaps stop walking under ladders

The other thing that tends to kill off PSUs is overheating - does your PC have good airflow through it? Is there much dust build up on the PSU fan or in the PC generally?

[Dogg Thang]

perhaps stop walking under ladders

Ha! This is important advice.
[MENTION=1218]Zaki[/MENTION] - honestly, I can't say for sure myself. It's from Scan. When it blew the first time, I just replaced the parts myself and it's clear I'm no expert so I can't vouch for my work but the PC was the neatest PC inside that I have ever seen, by far. When I brought it to a proper repair place on the second blowout, they said pretty much the same thing - it's a well put together machine. At the time they had a look around for an obvious problem but couldn't find anything except for the damage caused by the blowout itself. So yes, it's absolutely possible something isn't in there correctly and I certainly wouldn't know (and I could have compounded it myself with my own incompetency) but I would have thought that it would have been caught the second time.

The other thing that tends to kill off PSUs is overheating - does your PC have good airflow through it? Is there much dust build up on the PSU fan or in the PC generally?

No to dust. In fact, it has bizarrely little dust in it. I have never seen a computer so free of dust... but then that makes me wonder if it's due to a lack of airflow? Airflow would bring dust, right? So I'm not sure about the airflow or how I would know that. The room it's in tends to get very warm (it's a small room) so if the computer is running hot and in a hot room with poor airflow, could that just cause the whole thing to overheat?

[vanpeebles]

What temps are you getting? How many fans does it have?

[Dogg Thang]

Well no fans now. Everyone hates this computer.

[Dogg Thang]

What temps are you getting? How many fans does it have?

Okay, I found some of the original documentation which may have a few more answers.

4GB AMD FirePro W5100
240GB SSD
400GB Intel 750 AIC SSD Card
32GB 2x16GB... some big long number. RAM maybe?
3XS Card Reader
PIO BDR-209EBK BDRW Quad Layer
Asus Z170 Deluxe Intel Mobo
2TB SATA3 64M
Bequiet BK010 Shadow Rock slim
3XS Intel Core i7 6700K
3XS Evolve NLE HD Plus
Asus Strix Raid Pro 7.1 Sound.

I left out a few bits that don't seem important and left out a lot of big long numbers just so I wouldn't have to type them. No idea about temperature.