EggXpert

I recently purchased this card off Ebay , it works great until I try to fold with it. As soon as I fire up the gpu clients it starts squealing. It ran fine for a few days, then all of the sudden I head to the basement and the power light on the cards PCI-E plug is red. As you can see in the pictures, it appears to have shorted out. I was just wondering if someone would know what causes this. It still runs great now. Its been three days since it happened. It plays every game fine, even runs benchmarks fine. But it squeals like a pig when its folding. The PSU has been powering my 9800 GTX+ for almost 2 years, so I dont suspect thats the problem.  

Machine is:

MSI P43 Neo 3F 

Q6600

GSKILL DDR2 1066

9800 GX2

ABS Tagan ITZ 700W 

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I dont know a whole lot about electricity, circuits, etc..

It broke my heart to see the arc burns. 

I went against my better judgement by hooking it all back up. I was surprised to see that it still worked. The connections were good. Thats the first thing I checked. The psu is supposed to have over voltage protection. Maybe thats why there are only burns and not a fire. I have that particular machine set up on a Tech Station. I only use it for testing and occasionally removing malware off of hard drives. I suppose I should take your advice and retire both the psu and the GX2. :( 

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Were you using the 6 pin connector as well?

If not, thats why, its drawing so much current through the connector that its melting the plastic.

Also, Video cards "squeel" to warn you of low power conditions, and may also squeel if they have a abad capacitor, I'd check the main board and video card for bad capacitors.

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Yes I was using both the 6 pin and the 8 pin connector. I tried yesterday to open up the GX2, but the metal casing gets stuck on the plastic of the 8 pin power plug and I didn't want to break anything. If you look real close in the picture, bottom left corner of the plug on the card, you can see where the plastic is smashed up. It was like that when I got it. My guess is that it was having problems and someone tried to open it up prior to me. I'll give it another try and see if I can get it open. The motherboard looks fine. 

Thanks guys! 

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OK, i took her apart and other than the burn spot on the connector, it looks fine. I dont see any burnt traces. There are only four capacitors, and they look fine. Maybe the psu did go fruity loops on me.

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