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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

My desktop caught fire once. I pulled the plug and the fire went out. Turns out the graphics card burst into flames. That had never happened to me before in 40 years of desktops.

I had a fair amount of smoke damage that needed cleaning up.

Now it sits on a piece of sheet steel instead of the wood floor.

Edit: I usually assemble my desktop cases from mail order parts. This desktop happened to have a metal case rather than a plastic one - my future builds will all be metal cases.

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Well, they did warn you https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fak1.ostkcdn...

I don't get it, can you explain?

Read the text on the GPU

I had this happen once too. Was upgrading my machine. Swapped out the case, the motherboard, upgraded the fans and upgraded the CPU heatsink. Plugged it in and all 4 3TB WD Green drives were on fire within seconds and my PSU was smoking. After getting it under control, none of the hard drives nor the SSD would power on any more, my PSU was shot, my motherboard had scorchmarks, and one of the new fans no longer worked. I was only able to save the GPU, the heatsink, memory, fans minus the one, CPU, and the blu-ray drive.

I never figured out for sure, but I think I shorted out my cheap PSU when moving it; I probably should have bought a new one to start with but thought that was an easy place to save money. Ended up costing my like $900 and a ton of headaches. Go figure.

I never skimp on PSU, a bad PSU can cause all kinds of annoying and hard to diagnose instability.

Also fire, which isn't something I was worried too much about before, but will be now.

Definitely learned my lesson. My two machines now have expensive, highly-rated PSUs that I clean out several times a year. Saving $40-60 isn't worth the potential fire.

> I usually assemble my desktop cases from mail order parts.

Doesn't everybody? I mean unless you are building a case from scratch. I also don't know of any plastic desktop cases, they're either steel or aluminum.

> I also don't know of any plastic desktop cases

I have many in the basement housing older desktops.

Yeah plastic seemed more common in the past. If I had to speculate, I would say that as all the guts got cheaper and cheaper, and at some point a fairly low-powered desktop was more than most people would need, manufacturers didn't want to drop the price of the system any lower. At the same time they had to keep margins reasonable in order to compete. So, they spent more on the case.

My first PC - an Acer 486 had a plastic case. It's also why I kinda screwed up the construction of my second PC - studied the construction of the acer one, saw it was screwed into the case. So I screwed the new motherboard into the new case... I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't power on.

Took it to a friend's place, he just about fell over laughing when he realised I'd missed the copper risers.

A buddy of mine had his computer catch fire, it turned out to be a shorted USB plug with some sort of add-on board inside the case.

I stripped it down and verified everything and now it's my gaming PC.

I had a Sun Sparc Classic with a Sun 17" CRT monitor. It was the monitor that caught fire due to a build of dust on the electronics. Call me dirty, I guess.

"Back in the day" I worked in a ~50 person organization where there was a senior luddite who was the bane of the IT department. Well one day her monitor caught on fire. We engaged the services of the maintenance department to have a custom frame and plaque made for the charred circuit board. I suspect it still hangs in the server room to this day.

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