My MOSFET burnt up, have to buy new stuff

[LarsRIP]

Hey there everyone

So I came home from work yesterday and turned on my computer and heard the beautiful sound of electrical failure, followed by the smell and sight of glorious white smoke. Shut the PC off fast as anything and opened it up to check what was cooking. Found a MOSFET that had popped and most certainly that was the smoke I saw (and my roomed reeked off). On further investigation I found out that when swapping CPU coolers, some thermal paste had somehow, some way fallen into the RAM slot. I'm guessing it shorted something. 

 

So my ASUS V-GENE is dead, so I will need a new motherboard and with that new RAM and a CPU as well. So I guess it is time to say goodbye to my 3570K and Vengeance RAM, served well. I was wondering if any of you had any good recommendations for a combo here, my case size limits me to M-ATX.

My workflow is basically playing games like Witcher III, and whatever else doesn't suck at a given time, light photography editing and occasional video editing. ATM I have 2x GTX 670s in SLI - which the motherboard below does not support (SLI), but I intend on getting a GTX 1070 soon anyhow, and who knows, maybe my motherboard fried up some more stuff on its way out anyway. 

I mean this seems pretty straight forward, I was just thinking about going for a 6600K or 6700K, a mid tier MSI Z170 Motherboard (ignore the dank gamer MSI marketing) and some HyperX Fury RAM. I do want that ASUS VIII-GENE, but the money saved could be put towards a GTX 1070 or 6700K so.

What ya bois think? If nothing else feel free to laugh at my misery 

[burnttoastnice]

Sorry for your loss m8 The last time that happened to me fortunately it was just a bunch of LEDs and not my entire mobo...

[Mr.Meerkat]

What thermal paste were you using? AS5 and MX4 (the most common 2) are non-electronically conductive so you know...

[iamdarkyoshi]

Where do you live? I can repair this no problem. I have replaced mosfets before, but they were the size of a grain of rice.

Yours would be easy.

 

[LarsRIP]

I used the crap that came with my BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro 3, so I am not sure about the conductivity. It is the only thing I could visibly find being weird, though I bet it might've been something else. 

 

Thank you friendo, darkyoshi, but I live in Scandinavia so I am probably just getting some new stuff. Consumer society amiright

 

[iamdarkyoshi]

1 minute ago, LarsRIP said:

I used the crap that came with my BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro 3, so I am not sure about the conductivity. It is the only thing I could visibly find being weird, though I bet it might've been something else. 

 

Thank you friendo, darkyoshi, but I live in Scandinavia so I am probably just getting some new stuff. Consumer society amiright

 

Darn. I like fixing stuff...

[Mr.Meerkat]

5 minutes ago, LarsRIP said:

I used the crap that came with my BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro 3, so I am not sure about the conductivity.

It's Corning TC-5121 thermal paste...can't find out about whether it's electrically conductive or not

[LarsRIP]

5 minutes ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

It's Corning TC-5121 thermal paste...can't find out about whether it's electrically conductive or not

Thanks for effort, I was looking for my voltmeter to test it, but can't find it 

[iamdarkyoshi]

6 minutes ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

It's Corning TC-5121 thermal paste...can't find out about whether it's electrically conductive or not

It went all white and explody in the RAM slot, and I would bet anything it is conductive and bridged the pins on the RAM's power input, popping the mosfet. 

[LarsRIP]

16 minutes ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

It went all white and explody in the RAM slot, and I would bet anything it is conductive and bridged the pins on the RAM's power input, popping the mosfet. 

Guess the lesson is don't splosh around with your thermal paste. With my luck I'm just waiting for my Intel 330 SSD to die, so far so good.

[iamdarkyoshi]

1 minute ago, LarsRIP said:

Guess the lesson is don't splosh around with your thermal paste. With my luck I'm just waiting for my Intel 330 SSD to die, so far so good.

Idea: Clean up any thermal paste as good as you can with WD40 and then with rubbing alcohol. Try to RMA it. Don't say anything about thermal paste shorting things out.