It’s an absolute horror scenario: Your own apartment is on fire, cherished mementos, photos, all your belongings and, last but not least, the expensive gaming PC are on fire. With the latter in particular, one would think that there is actually no chance of salvation. After all, computers are made of many plastics and other supposedly heat-sensitive materials and tiny components.
The online mail order company Caseking has such a PC as part of the project »King my Case« opened. A new gaming machine, modded by the professionals at Caseking, beckons the owner.
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Graphics card defective? Detect and fix errors
The processor and graphics card survived the fire
Roman “der8auer” Hartung also looked at the burned down PC. In his current video, he wants to find out whether the built-in graphics card survived the fire in the apartment. You can watch the whole video here:
Link to YouTube content
Right at the beginning of the video, Roman explains that the processor survived the fire unscathed. In view of the pictures of the case fans completely melted down to the motor and thick lumps of solidified plastic that once belonged to a custom water cooling system (see picture below), this is quite astonishing.
The backplate and cooling fins of the graphics card also look worn out, although not completely useless at first glance. At second glance – i.e. after the removal – it becomes apparent that the GPU must also have been exposed to great heat. One of the three fans or the fan cover has partially melted and hangs deformed from the graphics card. It’s hard to imagine that the heat didn’t damage more sensitive components.
Roman dismantles heat sinks and fans in order to first clean any traces of fire with the circuit board, voltage converters and other small components of the graphics card with distilled water and detergent. By the way, the card is an MSI RTX 2070 Super Gaming X Trio.
The first measurements after cleaning give cause for hope: At least the card doesn’t seem to be completely defective. For the actual test, however, Roman first applied a new cooling system in the form of a liquid nitrogen container to the graphics card. In fact, it boots into the operating system flawlessly.
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How did the graphics card survive the fire?
Roman explains it as follows: During production, graphics cards have to withstand high temperatures, for example while the solder is being applied. During the fire, the temperatures do not appear to have been significantly higher. The circuit board is also particularly heat-resistant anyway.
What do you all mean? Are you surprised that the graphics card survived the fire, or did you even expect it? Feel free to write it in the comments!
