Burnt Core i5-760: what could have caused this?

[Nosada]

Pictures dont do this justice, but the second connector from the top on the left hand side was scorched black en was filled with molten plastic. Anyone have any clue what could have caused this after 5 years of perfectly stable operation?

Core i5-760
Asrock P55
8Gb RAM
HD 5850 1GB
Corsair VX550W

 

[Mathragh]

I take it the system doesn't work anymore?


It looks like some part of the motherboard VRM might've died, causing a short which in turn caused the connector to overheat and melt. Its not uncommon for motherboards to die in this fashion after a certain time.

Could be something else aswell though.

 

[zsolt_93]

It could be just that pin on the connector not making a proper contact and creating continuous sparking and heat. If it is dead then probably a short somewhere but certainly not the cpu as the vrm is fed by the separeate 4/8pin connector. I am leaning toward improper contact.

 

[Nosada]

It started out as random crashes (black screen, windows rebooting) which were unrelated to load (could play FFXIV for several hours without issue, then the day after it would crash just after booting and starting up chrome). But yes, the PC is completely unresponsive now (which makes me think the PSU died as well).

I'm curious if this was a motherboard failure (due to age, understandable) or that I need to buy a better PSU in the future. And by better I mean of higher quality, not higher wattage.

 

[Aquinus]

I take it the system doesn't work anymore?


It looks like some part of the motherboard VRM might've died, causing a short which in turn caused the connector to overheat and melt. Its not uncommon for motherboards to die in this fashion after a certain time.

Could be something else aswell though.

CPU VRMs are driven by the +12v EPS connector, not the ATX connector iirc. That particular pin I think is +12v iirc which would make sense if it wasn't in very good contact with the board. Bad contact means more resistance, more resistance means more resistive heating, which means melted plastic.

This seems to be the case when a lot a devices are using power to be driven off the PCI-E bus without external power from the PSU.

Edit: I just noticed your PSU is a Corsair VX550W. The 5850 is a power hungry card and if both the CPU and GPU are overclocked that could exacerbate the issue. Maybe your PSU could be at fault?

 

[Nosada]

It's a serious possibility. They worked together fine for about ... 3-4 years, but the PSU does degrade IIRC, so that 550 might have been struggling lately with the high temps.

 

[Aquinus]

It's a serious possibility. They worked together fine for about ... 3-4 years, but the PSU does degrade IIRC, so that 550 might have been struggling lately with the high temps.

I say this because I used to have a BFG (oh boy, going back,) PSU that was half decent but couldn't power a Phenom II 940 and a Radeon HD 6870 together but could power the PII and a 4850 just fine.