CPU smoke

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I have had a good look at my motherboard after removing the CPU heat sink and the CPU area is ok. However I have noticed this burning on what I believe is a heatsink for the motherboard chipset (image below)

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this is where it is located

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I now think that this is the cause of the original smoking.

Does anyone know of this happening to them? Why this has happened. I have a feeling that this is a cooling issue as this heatsink is located at the back of my PC so it may not be getting enough cooling.

I am going to contact Gigabye about this and see what they say.

Motherboard: Gigabye EX58-UD5
CPU: Intel i7-975 Extreme

Thanks for all your help people
 
I would say that should never happen. The chipset area isn't very close to your cpu, and the heatsinks are applied in a factory. Unless you spilled something anywhere on the board [water, coke or a peice of wire] then the fault likely lies with the board.

My £0.02
 
Sorry, I won't be able to review tonight as I just remembered the cable company disconnected my Internet while they were digging the trench to bury the cable yesterday. It will be tomorrow evening late before I will be back online.
 
Normally its a short that causes it. Problem is thats rare. In fact I just got one in today that the same area was pretty much fried (it literally caught fire). Looked like it started at the 4 pin for the mobo and went down from there.

As for the reason, its hard to say. As I said, it could have been a short due to a screw not placed in properly. Do you have standoffs in the right places? And no extra ones where they don't need to be?

If you did everything properly, you will probably want to send it back to Gigabyte. But as well you will want to test your CPU, GPU, RAM, etc. Because something like that can easily damage other components.

As for that part under that heatsink, they are normally the thermal regulators. Maybe they got overloaded or shorted out.
 
I have decided to purchase another motherboard and PSU as the motherboard has the burning on the heatsink.

I would like a 850w PSU the most efficient there is that creates the least about of heat. Can anyone recommend one?

I am also looking for a motherboard with the following specs:
Intel LGA 1366
SATA 3 6GB/s
Support of Kingston 2GB 1333 RAM
PCI-E
X58 Chipset
And a BIOS that loads ASAP. (My current one took quite a while)

Can anyone recommend one of these motherboards? I have been looking at
Asus P6X58D-E Premium
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Rev 2
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5

Has anyone had any experience with these motherboards? I Currently have Gigabyte GA-X58-UD5 which runs at SATA 3GB/s and it seems to have been OK (other than burning on one of the heatsinks that runs around the CPU area)
Also what is the difference between Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 and Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Rev 2 other than about £60.

Thanks

Carl