I blew my cpu fan circuit, Pc still works fine. What broke?

[Tommi the tinkerer]

Hi everyone.

I was tinkering with my fans and was measuring actual voltage between the leads, oops, the multimeter probes slipped. POP!!

Shorted out the leads and the result. Very loud POP from inside the PC.

Watching the fans still spinning I was hopeful. well soon they grind to a halt. It was official, the CPU fan with PWM is dead. Thegood part is, everything else works just fine, except that.

Question 1.

Does anyone know what part of the Mobo I just blew.
If I could find out maybe it is possible to repair. Cant see any visible damage.

Question 2.

Concern for worry about the PC just limping along waiting to die? Maybe I killed a Vreg chip?
Cant really see, they are under the heatpipe structure of the gigabyte mobo (EX58-UD5).

Many thanks in advance, I hope someone is a little more up to date on what circuit drives the Fan and how it relates to the rest of the system.

/Tommi the tinkerer

 

[T_T]

Welcome, Newcomer. In regards to question 1... If you cannot see any physical damage, nobody on the forum will be able to tell you any different. The only way to know if you have any other significant damage is to continue using and monitoring the mobo.

As for your concern in question 2, well that's just as difficult to determine. Motherboard problems, aside from bulging/leaking capcitors or scorch marks, are very difficult to find.

You should pick up a "Y" splitter for your case fans, and try to connect your heatsink fan to another port. If you cannot get the board to post, but feel that the no boot problem isn't related to the pop sound you heard, you could try working through the troubleshooting guide (the link in my signature) for common fault/failure info.