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December 14, 2017, 07:59:35 PM |
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If you're experiencing smoke from your rig - shut it down immediately and don't mine with it until you identify the issue. When you look at a PCI cable, part of the power is coming across each cable pair on the 6 or 8 wires coming there - so let's say a video card has 2x 8-pin PCI connectors, that's basically 8 pairs of power wires (power+ground). If a cards power demand is 185w (that's what AMD lists for the RX580, but obviously it can vary depending on whether you're tweaking it or not), and it's connected via a 6 pin PCIe connector, then it's getting ~61w per cable pair. It's not quite this simple, because it can also get some power from the PCI bus (probably GPU riser in this case), but to keep it simple let's just say it's getting all it's power from the PCIe connector. Power is like water, and each of those wire pairs is like hoses, so if one of them doesn't make a good connection, or is damaged internally, then the other wires take up the slack - so now instead of being 61w per pair, it's 92.5w. With most consumer PSU's, it's not like mining ones which have lower AWG wires, they have the highest wire gauge possible, so let's say they're 22 gauge wires, they're right at their threshold at 60w, so once you start moving more power across them, they're going to start heating up.
The typical rule of thumb with electricity is to utilize 80% of what's available - so if it's rated for 60w, then your target should be closer to 48w. This is especially true when figuring out your larger power consumption at the breaker/box.
Most of the time if you do see a fire, it's going to be at the weakest point in the connection - so if the cable is intact then you'll typically see the plastic around the PCIe connector melt or do similar undesirable things. If there is an internal break in the wire (depending on the wire and how it's configured), then you might see it where that flaw actually is.
Either way, if you smell something burning, then shut the rig down and full check it over - electrical fires are no fun and generally easy to avoid if you're just careful about what you do. Anyway, hope that helps.
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