Tong Family

Ok, our trusty Aquarium PC wouldn’t power up. It has been in mineral oil for close to three years now. Taking it out is quite a mess, but it is amazing how clean the components are. Here is what we discovered:
1. The CPU Fans on our Noctua NH-14D were burning out. there is too much friction from mineral oil for these things. We decided to remove them for now and see how natural convection works.
2. We were running nVidia GTX670 in SLI mode. When we took one out, it worked fine. But when we put the other in, one of the capacitors caught fire (!?!). I’m just glad we had the thing in mineral oil as in the real world this would have been really dangerous. We’ve had these two cards overclocked for the whole two years as mineral oil kept the fire down. So it looks like we need another set of GPU cards. Maybe time to upgrade from 1080p/144Hz to 1440p/120Hz or maybe wait for 4K to catchup with these resolutions. It’s a hard time to buy graphics cards as we are in a transition to 20nm at TSMC and also 4K monitors are just maturing.
 
It looks like you have a capacitor that failed. Unfortunately, the resultant fire also appears to have burned the circuit board. If the card is still under warranty then RMA it. If it isn’t you might be able to get it running again by replacing he capacitor. However, by the looks of the circuit board I’d not get my hopes too high as nearby components and traces also were probably damaged.
via Need Answers/Help Regarding My GPU that caught fire. – Tech Support Forum.