- Apr 30, 2023
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Story is, today I was tweaking OC settings on my old system that I’m slowly upgrading (Asus P7H55M with i7 870, recently added an RX 5700 and replaced old crappy PSU with Deepcool PF650) and something weird happened.
It used to run at 3.4Ghz without issues and I decided to try pushing for 3.8, upping the BCLK and voltage in small increments and then testing for stability, so nothing too crazy. I also had other voltages at fixed, safe values so I won’t be risking frying anything on auto. The only setting (other than Vcore and IMC voltages) I’ve altered today was PCI/PCIe CLK Status that I turned off. All onboard devices (including the audio) were also disabled a while ago since I don’t use them anyway.
A couple BSODs and voltage raises (again, nothing crazy, Vcore was like 1.175V iirc), boot attempt, it shuts down on POST. Turns on again, shuts down without booting and now the power button won’t do anything at all. Motherboard LED still glows. It also stinks of something burnt slightly. Disassembled everything, inspected the board and found the culprit, an ALC887 audio chip that looks totally fried likely causing a short: View: https://imgur.com/a/r57ZxC0
It’s not that I care much about this motherboard, I was going to replace it soon anyway. What actually bothers me now is just, how did that happen and why? My biggest worry is whether the PSU could’ve caused that, since I’m definitely not going to buy another one again. Nothing else on the motherboard looks burnt, PSU seems completely fine, no melted cables etc, paperclip test also worked. Didn’t test the GPU yet but all 4 SATA drives I had there work just fine. It handled an OCd RX5700 for a while and I don’t see how a mild CPU Vcore increase could kill it. Should I do some kind of testing before I get a new board and CPU? I also couldn’t find any similar stories about frying onboard audio like that. Honestly, I’d expect killing a VRM or something by OCing, but frying an unused audio chip seems absolutely bizarre to me.
It used to run at 3.4Ghz without issues and I decided to try pushing for 3.8, upping the BCLK and voltage in small increments and then testing for stability, so nothing too crazy. I also had other voltages at fixed, safe values so I won’t be risking frying anything on auto. The only setting (other than Vcore and IMC voltages) I’ve altered today was PCI/PCIe CLK Status that I turned off. All onboard devices (including the audio) were also disabled a while ago since I don’t use them anyway.
A couple BSODs and voltage raises (again, nothing crazy, Vcore was like 1.175V iirc), boot attempt, it shuts down on POST. Turns on again, shuts down without booting and now the power button won’t do anything at all. Motherboard LED still glows. It also stinks of something burnt slightly. Disassembled everything, inspected the board and found the culprit, an ALC887 audio chip that looks totally fried likely causing a short: View: https://imgur.com/a/r57ZxC0
It’s not that I care much about this motherboard, I was going to replace it soon anyway. What actually bothers me now is just, how did that happen and why? My biggest worry is whether the PSU could’ve caused that, since I’m definitely not going to buy another one again. Nothing else on the motherboard looks burnt, PSU seems completely fine, no melted cables etc, paperclip test also worked. Didn’t test the GPU yet but all 4 SATA drives I had there work just fine. It handled an OCd RX5700 for a while and I don’t see how a mild CPU Vcore increase could kill it. Should I do some kind of testing before I get a new board and CPU? I also couldn’t find any similar stories about frying onboard audio like that. Honestly, I’d expect killing a VRM or something by OCing, but frying an unused audio chip seems absolutely bizarre to me.
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