ok so I was putting some old parts in another case so that I can give it to a friend, and i had an old 6 series card laying around, but with a broken capacitator that i glued back on carefully, I figured the worse thing that can happen is that it won't post, but when I put it in, I saw a big spark coming from the SATA ports? or something around there and a crapload of smoke come out, immediately I unpluged my power immediately, and then there was a flame burning away at the sata port plastic for about 15 seconds afterwards. stupidly I tried booting it back up(with my ultra) and then got nothing, the LEDS on the motherboard only had --, it was pretty good too, it was a 200 buck 590 sli mobo from foxconn with a 2.4 ghz amd 4600+ anyways I'm wondering how the hell could that have happened? if anything I thought it would set my video card on fire but nope, it set something off around the sata ports
The motherboard feeds power to the video card, so if there's something wrong with the video card it's quite possible to have an effect on the motherboard. Of course, it could have been something else (motherboard contacts touching metal case?, molex cable touching a motherboard component?).
What kind of glue did you use and how long did you let it dry? I really really suck at chemistry but some glues are combustible, so I figure their vapors may be as well.
Rubber glue? Ok, Sorry about the glue comment. The capacitors are almost all electrolytic which means they are polarity sensitive. Putting positive (+) to negative (-) almost always launches the cap similar to a bottle rocket. I use to do this as kids and I always had the best rockets! Anyway, remove the crud, using California's Hazard waste guide lines and check for damage to your card. If there is no damage to the traces, adjacent parts and such, read the number on a similar capacitor on your card, buy it, and using a very fine soldering tip, solder it in correctly making sure your (+) and (-) are correct! The capacitor will probably be about 100 to 300mfd at 16 volts ($.35). If there was damage to the card save it for future parts! You might just clean up the card, check for damage and try the card for correct operation as most of the capacitors are utilized for power supply filtering. TheBite
