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We've seen a lot of repair jobs around here, but rarely do we come across GPUs that were victims of a house fire. Sure, RTX 80- and 90-class cards with 16-pin power connectors melt all the time, but that's because of some internal factor — what if everything around your GPU (and PC) was burning? That's what happened with one Asus RTX 4060 in China, and it miraculously survived through the whole thing as documented by expert technician Brother Zhang.
Watch On Apparently, the victim was using an electric heater that likely sparked and ignited the fire that eventually engulfed the entire room. Everything was charred as a result, including the computer that housed the RTX 4060. From the pictures, we can tell that most of the plastic and rubber or silicone components have melted off, but the metal is intact; the heatsink for the CPU cooler and the chassis held their shape.
Taking a closer look at the graphics card shows that it had started to melt from the left side of the fan shroud. The backplate was severely damaged and had oxidation burns all over it. Taking off the case revealed that it's also warped from the inside, but the now-exposed PCB actually looked fine. It was charred with oxidation marks and covered in soot, but no component seemed damaged visually.
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Checking the power rails quickly confirmed there was no internal short, and the core itself was somehow not cracked from the heat (that would've been the end). Before testing any further, Brother Zhang washed the PCB under the tap with some liquid soap and a toothbrush. He scrubbed off all the smoke residue, cleared out the video ports, and got the card looking as good as new.
The GPU was then retested for any shorts and put on a test bench with a makeshift heatsink on the core — it posted right away. This RTX 4060 had survived the house fire without any component-level damage whatsoever. Now, all that was needed was a new cooler, and this GPU would be off to the races. Brother Zhang couldn't find the exact one he was looking for, so he settled for a similar RTX 4060 Ti cooler.
He modded it to fit the restored RTX 4060 and put it on a much nicer test bench with high-end parts for final testing. The card looked brand new because of its fresh body, and it performed like it, too, with the core peaking at just around 56 degrees Celsius in Furmark. This was an extraordinary case where the potential for damage was ridiculously high, yet the GPU managed to escape its wrath.
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/rtx-5060-in-a-house-fire-suffers-melted-shroud-and-fans-but-survives-with-pcb-intact-scorched-gpu-just-needed-a-cleanup-and-a-new-cooler-for-full-restoration#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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