One of my closest electronic friends died this morning. I’m still in shock. I can’t understand how such a senseless death could happen.
As I was working this morning, I heard a large CRASH from the computer cabinet.
Five seconds later, one of the computers shut off … no power. Dead.
Opening the case, I found the CPU fan laying at the bottom of the chassis… the fiberglass reinforced plastic lugs on the Mobo that hold the CPU heatsink clips had broken, sending the 1 pound mass of aluminum and copper crashing 8 inches to the bottom of the case, yanking its cable of its 4-pin bulkhead, bending the pins.
When this happened, my AMD Phenom II 1055T processor and 8 GB of RAM were 100% utilized doing a batch of HandBrake processes…consuming its fully rated 140 watts from the 700 watt power supply.
I’m concerned now that the processor suffered collateral damage due to the sudden heat spike…
I’ve been building and repairing PCs for the last 20 years, and I’ve never seen that type of failure before…
I’ve seen CPUs literally go up in smoke, I’ve seen electrolytic capacitors explode. I’ve seen voltage regulators burn a hole through a motherboard. I’ve seen fans throw blades out with such velocity that they sliced ribbon cables… I’ve seen a power supply catch fire, filling the house with acrid smoke and setting off the smoke detectors in the middle of the night. I’ve even seen a 40x CD-ROM shatter a CD sending polycarbonate shrapnel and aluminum powder, like glitter, everywhere.
But never have I seen a simple mechanical failure of a heatsink mount…
So now, without my “Mother” computer, I no longer have:
My VPN gateway so that I have access to all my goodies from my iDevices out in the world
Four webservers
My Playlist generator (Custom Perl scripts)
My Network Statistics Collector (MRTG)
etc…
I guess it’s time to see how efficient MSI’s RMA process is…