Has your video card ever fried itself?

[Technochicken]

So I was surfing the web today, and my computer froze. I didn't think that was too abnormal, so I waited for it. Then both my displays turned gray, and each half of the screen started switching between a dark and light shade, and little black and white dots raced across it. After a few seconds of this, the computer shut off completely and would not reboot. I popped open the case, and what do I see? One of the spring loaded clips that holds the small cooler on my GPU was gone, and the cooler was hanging off diagonally. I thought this was good, as it should be easy to fix. I put a dot of thermal paste on the gpu, and put the two pins back in. It would power up for a second, but then shut off. So I thought the paste might be short circuiting something. I cleaned it off, and put back the cooler, with no paste. Immediately after pressing the power button, the video card shot out a spark and a small cloud of smoke, so naturally I pulled the cord. Upon inspection, a fragment of one of the power regulating chips (I think) was missing.

I'm still waiting to see if EVGA will replace it.

 

[raybay]

That is really not possible... but it can seem like those events are independent of human action.
Those dang spring clips create more damage to computers and printers than we can tolerate. We're getting mad as heck, and were not going to take it any more...
But I suspect your card was already in the midst of failure when you decided to improve on things.

 

[Technochicken]

i think the cooler coming loose is what killed, it, not the mini explosion. I was under the impression that modern CPU's have a temperature based cut-off system, so they don't fry themselves, but I guess that does not stretch to low end GPU's.

At least EVGA is letting me RMA it. I must say, they responded extremely quickly, which is a good sign for getting it replaced.