Can dust possibly have killed my pc?

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Jonas Magnusson

Jonas Magnusson

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Earlier this day when I was playing crossout I went to the bathroom and hear a loud pop or bang noise from the computer so I went back in a hurry and the room smelled like gunpowder(at least what I recall gunpowder smelling like) and there was a power outage from the wall (which I turned back on later with my backup pc) so I opened up the case of the pc and the gunpowder smell was very strong from my AMD 4890 graphics card so I removed it from the pc. When I had it removed the smell was only from one of the two fans which was the one with tons of dust on and inside of it while the other one was clean and didn't smell at all.

I have not powered on this computer again at the current time and will not do so until I'm sure about the problem.
 
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Not so sure about that. C-States, Speedstep and EISD are power saving featues. I might understand if they were safety features. The many c-states only allow for the limiting of the voltage(among other things) to that state. They won't cause an issue like...
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SchizTech

SchizTech

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Well that would be an unconventional way for dust to kill a PC (as opposed to suffocating it and causing overheating). It's also odd to hear of one stuffed fan and one clean one, as I'd expect a somewhat more even distribution. In any event, things don't sound great as it concerns that card if there's a smell like that coming from anywhere on it.

The only way to be sure what is and isn't good is to test of course. See if it starts first, and use onboard graphics if your board has it.
 
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Jonas Magnusson

Jonas Magnusson

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Well that would be an unconventional way for dust to kill a PC (as opposed to suffocating it and causing overheating). It's also odd to hear of one stuffed fan and one clean one, as I'd expect a somewhat more even distribution. In any event, things don't sound great as it concerns that card if there's a smell like that coming from anywhere on it.

The only way to be sure what is and isn't good is to test of course. See if it starts first, and use onboard graphics if your board has it.
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The reason why only one of the fans had dust on/in it was because I cleaned this pc a few weeks ago and I didn't disassemble it and only cleaned one of the fans because I didn't look to see if it had another one. The one with all the dust was where the smell came from when I spun the fan with my hand.

Also my cpu is a i7 920 which does not have an integrated gpu and the mobo is an asus p6t deluxe v2 powered with a tx750w.
 
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aquielisunari

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That question has been asked before. Was dust the genesis for a card needing to be RMA'd?
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Yep. Just a sad case of neglect that happens all too often. It can get so bad that the fans don't cool it enough. Normally overheating will lead to a shutdown which avoids the catastrophic shutdowns. However with filth can come mildew which electrical components don't like.

Possible? Yes. Other components such as the PSU and motherboard could also have been affected.
 
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Jonas Magnusson

Jonas Magnusson

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Not what I remember.The smell is mostly gone now since it occured more than 12 hours ago. I don't remember the psu smelling odd, only the the area where the cpu and gpu where located and by removing the gpu I noticed that the smell came from it and most likely not the cpu.
 
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SchizTech

SchizTech

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This suggests the card has gone to eternal rest in the great LAN party in the sky. To determine whether any other parts were affected just do a bit of testing. It's possible but not certain that anything else was damaged, so only a bit of troubleshooting can tell.
 
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thx1138v2

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Jun 18, 2011
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Another thing to consider is your environment. If you live in a very dry climate, static electricity will collect in the dust. I suppose that could also blow a card if the static electricity was somehow shorted to ground through the component.

If you live in a dry climate dust is your computer's enemy.

This is somewhat different but I saw it happen. A friend was on his hands and knees crawling across the carpet to his computer that was on the floor. The humidity was extremely low that day. When he reached to plug in a USB cable a spark jumped from his finger tip to a pin connector inside the PS2 mouse port. He had to replace the motherboard.

That's another tip - never put your computer on the floor. That's where all of the dust falls to and a lot of it will get sucked in.
 
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aquielisunari

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You asked if dust could have killed your PC.

I said that dust started the issue behind that card dying and needing to be RMA'd.. Another way of saying yes. Was the RMA carried out after XFX received the card? I don't think so.

Please let us know what you figure out on your end. It can help someone else with a similar issue in the future.
 
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Jonas Magnusson

Jonas Magnusson

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I think it might be the PSU that has killed every component because when I put my old 7800 GT in it it will not post or do anything, I removed the hard drive and used an adapter for an old 2.5 inch drive with this 3.5 inch if that matters and the drive didn't spin and wasn't recognized on any of my laptops.
This picture shows the internals of this corsair tx750w PSU and I can't see anything unusual with it.
QN9jlx7.jpg
 
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aquielisunari

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My first thought was what the bleep is that. I then thought that it's the PSU. I then kicked myself when I read the rest of your post. Helps to read the entire post. I'm not that familiar with PSU innards so I can't tell if anything is odd apart from the DUST. I'm leaning to either an ESD or some sort of condensation that caused the PSU to do what it possibly did. Does the connector on the GFX card or the slot itself have any scorch marks?

The plot thickens and gets more expensive:( Which PSU is/was that? Many modern PSU's(quality units) will have many protections including short-circuit protections
Johnny52k_g22_v2.jpg
that will prevent that type of "domino" catastrophic failures. Thanks for the update.
 
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Jonas Magnusson

Jonas Magnusson

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Corsair TX750 bronze from 2008
The pc was on the floor when it happened though I didn't witness it happening, only hearing and smelling it.
The card had no marks as far as I can tell.
 
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Jonas Magnusson

Jonas Magnusson

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Yesterday I bought a new PSU and that fixed the issue. I did also reset my bios because the new psu couldn't handle the same overclocks/overvolts, so the cpu runs at stock values now and that's not a big issue because the 4890 is the bottleneck. That also made me think that because I turned off C state technology so the voltage remained the same regardless of workload that it pressured the old PSU to its death, after all it was 8 years old and definitely not dust clean.
 
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aquielisunari

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Not so sure about that. C-States, Speedstep and EISD are power saving featues. I might understand if they were safety features. The many c-states only allow for the limiting of the voltage(among other things) to that state. They won't cause an issue like disabling a safety feature that would prevent thermal shutdown. The only thing disabling that would do is cause the PSU to offer a continuous 1.312V(example) as opposed to the variable voltage C-step allows.

That OC'ing info may have helped in the beginning. Not sure what it would have changed but when a patient comes in for a doctor appt....

I'd blame it on old age but, the world will never know its cause of death:(
 
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