Ok, found a few minutes to look closer... I think I found the problem. I am really glad I put some scrap 10ga steel underneath these miners. This was the board facing down and it was running only 220MHz.
Wow, okay now I'm a bit concerned.
I had the exact same damage -- in the exact same area your picture shows. In my case, it actually started a fire which took out a second Prisma (blew all the caps off one side , popping like popcorn kernels before I could hit hit the power and grab the extinguisher). But I didn't want to panic people and told ASICMiner and Canary I was assuming it was a fluke, and was focused mostly on getting my RMA completed. I'm really glad you're safe and didn't burn your house down, man -- because in the back of my mind I've been thinking "what if the problem *ISN'T* a fluke and hits someone else, when he's not home?"
I told Canary (who presumably told FC) that I wasn't really interested in trying to "publicly embarrass AM" and was happy to keep things between us -- so long as two conditions were met: (1) they replace the damaged Prismas in a timely fashion (which didn't happen unless you consider weeks to be "timely") and (2) "unless it appears to be a widespread problem and not a random component failure."
So both #1 and #2 have hit at this point; when i saw your pictures in my browser, I swear I thought "Wow, FC is posting the images of the damage that happened? That's really honest of him..." I mean, it's like looking at a duplicate of mine ... though you seemed to get things under control faster than I did (the fire charred the entire bottom of mine, and there were no capacitors "unpopped" on the Prisma where this damage occurred).
So let me be clear since I've been silent (and OBVIOUSLY should not have been) -- I can't calculate the odds of *two* random manufacturing defects causing the *exact* same damage in *exactly* the same spot (center -top of one board, or center-bottom depending on how you look at it, and causing enough damage to affect the adjacent corner board as well). Maybe the odds aren't so bad. But I'm inclined to think that there is something amiss with whatever component blew in both of our Prismas -- is it a vreg?
All I can say for certain is that if I had not been home (just arrived back from errands about 5 minutes before I heard the alarm) and if I hadn't put a smoke alarm on my mining "shelf" (the main one in the hallway took a good 10 minutes or so to finally go off) then there's no doubt in my mind that the fire caused by a Prisma just like yours, would have done an *enormous* amount of damage. Even putting it out as fast as I could, it took practically all night with all the windows open and like 5 box fans trying to pump all the smoke out of my apartment and it took all night sifting through charred parts of the wire rack that it *melted* before I could finally get enough of the debris out of my office ...but then I took a shower (and I guess washed the smell out of my nose) because it was sure as hell still there... Took *days* to finally stop smelling like melted plastic and...
Anyway, I'm not going to lie here -- I'm a mixture of embarrassed and sincerely horrified to see another customer affected by the *exact* same damage, which I could have sounded the alarm about ~2 weeks ago -- and I'm so sorry to you, and so very glad that you had a metal plate under your Prisma to contain the damage and not lose things in a fire. What's more, you're doing *exactly* what I should have done (and didn't) -- I sent my pictures in and asked for an RMA, and *you* posted the pictures here and warned people to help avoid more damage/injuries/etc.
I've never met you before in my life, but you are the better man (or woman) and I am pretty certain I'm a selfish piece of shit right now. I apologize to you, and to everyone else for not saying something sooner -- and I hope others will *please* take this threat seriously and put some kind of metal protection around/under their Prismas... ...and to be honest, I feel like someone just punched me in the stomach -- I know I should probably post more and add details and etc, but I need a drink or something. I don't know how I would have lived with myself if someone had been injured, or worse... I don't know what the fuck I was thinking assuming it was a "fluke" -- that's not my job to determine, I have no qualifications to assume that, I should have done like you just did.... Fuck, I ... will come back and post more if needed, but I'm literally floored by this and -- I'm just VERY glad that nobody was hurt by my failure to report this, and I fear I'm just repeating the same shit over and over...so again, let me come back to this and post a bit less freaked out a little later,
but I'm truly sorry and very ashamed of my inaction; my main goal in writing this (admittedly hastily and shittily written) message ASAP was just to make sure I got that message across as soon as I saw this had happened, but I apologize for not being able to cobble together a slightly better post than this.
Friends/fellow miners, please take this danger seriously. While I don't have any way to know how many Prismas are affected by this, it seems hard to imagine that *only* our two are capable of this very specific type of failure -- so it seems clear to me at this point that it's not an isolated problem. (Well, it's isolated in that it apparently happens in the same spot ... but not isolated in terms of people, or Batches, or etc.) And for the record, I never overclocked *anything* -- everything was running at stock speeds, and running well, for about 3 days, with zero warning signs before it happened to me. I can't believe I didn't say something sooner.
PS: The exploding capacitors were so hot, they actually *embedded* themselves into areas all over my office. When I was finally getting the mining rigs (other than the Prismas) up and running the next day, I found several of my S3s were seemingly dead ... but it turns out they just all had dead network cables. I swapped them out and didn't notice until later that day that somewhere on each of the 3 ethernet cables was either a cap (melted halfway through cable, through the exterior protective sheath, embedded right where all the individual data connections are) or a small "cap-sized hole" melted far enough into the cable to leave a recognizable impression (and a clear view to the data connections that it had severed). So this probably is the most obvious statement in the world but: "The exploding capacitors can and will start fires or damage other equipment," it's vital people take serious care in terms of *where* they choose to store Prismas, because they will want something protecting other equipment from damage if it's all on the same shelf, for example.
