[SOLVED] Electronic noise, followed by lose of display, and weird burning smell

[stemchimp]

Hi, I had just came home and booted up my pc, with some random video playing in the background. I then went to take care of some things for 10 minutes in another room. Then I heard electronic noises coming from my speakers and came back into the room. The electronic noises had stopped and my monitor was not picking up any visual output, no matter what port I used, both the PCI and the HMDI. But the thing is, my pc was still running and I was still getting sound output from the video I had playing. So I decided to restart my pc and everything booted correctly and there was visual output to my monitor. Then I smelled something akin to burning plastic coming from my rig so I decided to turn it off and remove all external connections. I left it for about 15 minutes before I opened it up to look for the cause of the smell. After sniffing around, the source seemed to be coming from my GPU. Currently, I've removed my GPU and used my electric air compressor and clean out my rig. I'm not sure if the main issue is just my GPU or could it have been the PSU dying and sending out a surge to my GPU and frying it too.

CPU: Intel Core i5-4460 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Processor
Motherboard: ASRock ATX DDR3 1333 LGA 1150 Motherboards FATAL1TY Z97 Killer
Memory: Corsiar VENGEANCE® Pro Series — 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3 DRAM 2400MHz C10 Memory
Storage: ADATA Premier Pro SP600 128 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
Storage: Hitachi Ultrastar 1 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 4 GB WINDFORCE 3X Video Card
Case: NZXT Phantom 530 ATX Full Tower Case
Power Supply: SeaSonic G 550 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit

 

[howtobeironic]

Ooh. Burning smell is really not good. You probably lost something over there, but you will need to troubleshoot parts. Try around with a different PSU/GPU (internal if you have one) if you can. See if there is problems. If you don't, try sending the GPU to the service to have it checked upon. (PSU too, if it has warranty.)

By the way, how reliable is the power grid of your neighborhood? Do you have a surge-protected wall plug/external plug? Or a surge protector on your house's grid? Those get to be more important if you're around somewhere with a good amount of electric surges (normally, your PSU has one, and since it's a 80+ Gold, it has a good one, but you should not leave all the work on it). A friend of mine recently got his laptop fried on a surge. Hopefully it was just the charging assembly, but you get the idea.

 

[stemchimp]

Yeah I use a surge-protected power strip after an incident 2 years ago during a storm surge that fried my previous MOBO. I built my rig a little over 5 years ago and I think my PSU's warranty only covers 5 years but I'll try contacting them. I gave my GPU a once-over and I didn't see any external or extensive damage. I did a boot test again with it and things seem to run normally, but I have not gotten a chance to run some more graphics intensive stuff.