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Well, I do actually wonder about that, seeing how some setups are, the probability of a GPU/ASIC catching fire seems pretty high..

Please post if you actually ever had a fire in one of your rigs!

Haha, I thought there would be much more people with burning plastic :P
Im going to catch some sleep now, maybe in 8 hours someone responded and I can read it while drinking some coffee....

Happens more often that you think.  Not necessarily fires, but burnt circuitry and what not, especially overclocking video cards.  I mostly see it in LTC mining as the extra push for VRAM overclocking seems to be what causes most of the problems.

Had video card fan die on a 10 year old computer and the video card caught on fire (smoke and all). Replaced the video card and it was back up and running like champ. Just some crappy system for remote use, not related to mining at all. But I can definitely see if the fan dies when someone is mining the GPU will be toast. I doubt it would start a real fire unless there was some kindling on top of the card. Just avoid putting kindling on your rigs and you should be fine :)

Woot!
Do you think your house would catch on fire if you wherent near it?

Not from mining but I had a desktop I had been using and no changes made it for some months and no issues with it until one night it froze.
I press reset and it froze again on bios screen and then as it had a side window i noticed "red" glow, look at it noticed one of the molex wires to the fan was starting glowing brighter, then plastic melted and huge amount of black smoke started to blow out of it thru the PSU fan, I pulled the plug it and had to open a window just to clear that nasty burnt plastic smell out (I'm sure my cancer chances hav increased as a result of that :| ).

 I think it may have been a wire crossed but could have just been age or insect got into it, as it seemed only one part was actually burnt and damaged -  was a splitter that had 2 fans connected to it.  One of the fans had it connector slightly melted but was probably usable but I still threw it out with the splitter as the whole experience had me freaked out at the time.

 All this happened over a period of seconds, and I'm still not exactly sure why it happened but the experience left me convinced of always using the better quality components after that as prior to that i would use the cheapest brands/unbranded and to minimize my use of splitters.

Yes. Not inside the rig per se, but one of my UPS got damaged and burst into fire one night after a blackout. The cracking and the smoke woke me up, since my room can get quite cold and my rigs are fairly well ventilated for the most part, sometimes I keep them on after I go to sleep. Oh gods, that smell... I unplugged it off immediately, though I realized it wouldn't really do much, then unplugged my PC off it and ended up having to toss it outside the window as I didn't really have anything handy to put out the fire and I wasn't really thinking straight at that moment. The plastic part in the front of my PC case ended up melting off partly and there was some charring on the metallic part but works just fine. I've wised up and now I keep a small dry chemical fire extinguisher next to my bed.

I've had one short flame from a motherboard when a VRM or a cap burned out.  It was hard to tell which went first.

Surprisingly, never any flames from video cards over 2+ years.

+1
Mine is too, but I mean like the interior and such :P

There was a guy last year whose rig burned down his house.

Bitcoiners promptly started a charity drive which resulted in a glorious 2 $.

Bitcoiners are Jewish, exhibit A. the prosecution rests

http://buttcoin.org/bitcoin-house-fire

I was slightly wrong, it's 1.2 BTC by now.

That's the "official" version, yes.

I had mine catch fire the other day! I guess a power supply rated for 550 watts continuous actually means temporarily!  ::) I had 2 560ti's and a redeon card in it, mining and gaming at the same time.  :o My kill-a-watt was reading ~540watts and had been that way for a while. The computer just shut off, I hit the power button and nothing, then there was a loud pop, a flash and lots of smoke! Good thing the psu was under warranty! Thats the first time I've had an issue with an antec. I put a 1200watt in there now. Sorry i don't have a picture of the carnage, I was too concerned about getting the smoking psu out. But here's the after
http://s6.postimg.org/andxuqrgh/photo.jpg

Holy shit!
Well, I have a Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 620w Bronze, and if everything is under load (unrealistic) the system pulls 560w and I was not comfortable with that as I have a Antec 900 case which are known for not having a hole in the bottom to supply the Power Supply some air so it's essentially suicide.

I was sitting there one day a couple weeks ago, Just put in new cards in my system. Was mining and playing CSS and some nice blue flames came from my case, pc shut down and started right back up. Ran fine for a couple weeks and died.

Never heard of a house fire from it.  Don't want his electrician.

One time I needed some free space on my PC so I connected the USB-IDE converter to the HDD, connected the USB cable to the converter, (this is where the magic begins) and plugged the molex cable in. As expected, my dumbness resulted in my PC shutting down. I thought "oh you dumb shit its not sata lol youre so dumb now lets connect the cable and turn on the pc lololo" and secured the molex cable and pressed the power button.

Apparently, the spark that happened when I first stupidly connected the power cable while the PC was on caused a cap to fry, resulting in a flame that was more than 17 inches high that came from a cap on the HDD.
So I pressed the PC's power button for 4 seconds instead of plugging out the power cable and the PCB already turned black by the time the PC turned off.

One of my rigs stopped working one day. The power was off, so I turned the power on from the Mobo and instantly sparks started shooting out of the power cable, close to where it was connected to the PSU. It looked like one of those fountain fireworks, but on a smaller scale. It surprised the crap out of me.

Moral of the story: don't buy low gauge cheap Ebay c13 to c14 cables from China

I burned down my mobo few years ago out of stupidity. PC was on and I needed to remove an unplugged drive from the rig, so I started unscrewing it and one of the screws dropped right onto some pins. Mobo sparked a bit and died, fortunately the rest survived. Play it safe people ;)

About a month ago, I came home from work to find my desktop turned off (i leave it on 24/7) and a foul smell of burnt electronics was still hanging in the room.
One of the voltage regulators around the CPU decided to call it quits and caught fire, taking an inductor and a few capacitors down with it.

Amazingly, after that, the machine still booted up fine, being only slightly unstable under full load.
Being switched on 24/7 probably wasn't the best thing that happened to it. But on the other hand, harddrives do tend to last longer when they aren't turning on and off all the time. Only one harddrive crashed during 6 years.

interesting

Definately. The HDD crash also happened when I had to turn the machine off, wich was only a few months ago.
Before that, it was running fine. SMART said it was fine, and I run a drive fitness test every now and then just to see if everything is still OK, and that also checked out fine.
After having it shut off for about 3 hours, the HDD started to degrade fast. Got a couple more weeks out of it, but it started to throw bad sectors, SMART didn't think it was OK, and it started to slow down because of read errors.

I vaguely remember reading about at least two BFL ASICs producing smoke instead of hashes.

I've seen a mini-rigvideo and the wiring is real shit, and the Nexus 7 is replaced by a piece of cardboard...
BFL is a piece of shit.

Everybody knows electronics work on smoke.
When the smoke leaks out, they stop working.

The only time that this happened, was when i was much younger maybe 5-6 backs, my HDD made a flame 2-3 inches long, it was a good lightning show  :D

Scary stuff. Never had any of this happen to me when I used to mine. The worst was a power supply just stopped working and never worked again.

Very lucky :P

hes trolling u ;)

LOL @ firing it back up after blue flames shoot out. "Its probably fine..."  ;D

Ive had a power supply cable melt before. Pretty scary stuff, I dont like to think about what wouldve happened if I wasnt home...

When I was at school, I had a Saturday job in the consumer electronics part of a large department store.

We were selling a lot of Rigonda TVs from Russia - this was about 36 years ago.

One Saturday, a customer came in to collect a TV that had died and been sent away for repair. He had the returns docket and I went out to the stock-room and found his TV and checked that it had all of the paperwork to say that it had been back to the importers and had been fixed and sent back to us.

I brought it out to the front and gave it to him.

He asked if he could see it working in the shop before taking it home.

I had no problem with that so I plugged it into the mains, fixed up a signal feed and turned it on.

Count one, count two and a column of acrid black smoke erupted from the back. Think gulf war burning oil well but on a smaller scale. This was followed by a whoosh and a flame almost a yard high. I just grabbed the power cable and pulled as hard as I could until it came away. Thankfully the flame and smoke subsided and vanished.

Awkward silence.

"Tell you what sir." I offered. "I will go to the stock room and get you a brand new one and you can have that."

He accepted with a smile and took it home to his trusting family. I do hope that it all worked out OK for them.

Burned up my mobo, no fire but that lovely burning plastic smell. Think was from not using molex on pcie risers

No, but I have had a laptop start burning around where the charger plugs into the system. It melted the cable that connects the screen but it didn't matter as I quickly threw it out of the window as I thought it might explode or something. It was pretty new so I managed to get a whole new system from the company and I was able to keep the HD which was intact.  ;D I guess they was surprised when they got the old one back in the mail since it was in a state.

It happens even to the best of us  :D

Yeah, I started this tread, and almost have to tell a story myself now :( not that impressive and no fires, but it was high risk.

My PC's a gaming rig and occasially used for Mining, at some point my 620W Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 could not put out more than ~220W and I put my hand on the Power Supply, my hand where almost fried as it was so damn hot, I let it cool down for a few hours and then stress testing my 2 videocards but even at stock my PC crashed and at that time it was pulling ~280W and the Power supply was so hot again and so vague smell of burned plastic began to fill my room, i''ve had this happen everytime i was mining but now I knew it was from the power supply and today I unscrewed the thing and pulled it out:
I almost had to cry, my case had the Power supply in the bottom, and with all normal cases, there is a fan-cutout in the base of the case, my Antec 900 appeantly doesn't have this and the idiot who put my PC together put the fan pointed down, so it could not get any air.

I turned it over and now if my whole system is stressing it pulls 450~ Watts without a problem and the Power supply stays fucking cold -__-
That could of had fryed my PC.

Should send a complaint to who put your system together, that could have cost you a good chunk of change.

i came across this, reminded me of this thread:
http://www.fun4epics.com/images/humor-pc-on-fire.jpg

So if your rig goes on fire, do not use facebook to update your status!  :D

I've had sparks when a GPU died (power circuits), but no other damage done.

One of my 7950's sparked and lit on fire when my face was about 6 inches from it... Almost burned my eyebrows off! :o

Got a power cable go up in flames. (Probably defective)

Blue sparks + Flames, the cheep power bar didn't even switch off.

Lucky me, the GPU miner didn't get any damage.


It was running 3x7950's

Yeah yeah I have called that son of a bitch and he said it was normal to mount a Power Supply like that (upside down), the dumbass probably didn't think and just ignored that there was no cutout, I think anyone with a mind places a VITAL part of a PC in such way that it can get fresh air.