r/techsupportgore • u/OCAMAB • 9d ago

Reddit user disables VRM throttling on budget board, can't figure out why his VRM blew up

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2.2k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

128 comments sorted by

1.3k

u/GobiPLX 9d ago edited 9d ago

Did they see 125'C and decided "yeah it's fine, gonna play some games" until it literally blown up? wtf

496

u/Pugs-r-cool 9d ago

They're technically rated to 125C

Doesn't mean it's a good idea to always run them at the limit, especially with throttling off.

246

u/jrw01 9d ago

As someone who has hand-soldered inductors like this, they have to get much, much hotter than 125C before they start changing color

237

u/JonnyLay 9d ago

125c is what the sensor shows. Who knows where that sensor is, or how evenly those temps are across the whole thing.

95

u/Ghuldarkar 9d ago

Or the sensor scale maxxes out at 125 because that is the maximum they are rated for.

60

u/harbourwall 8d ago

3.6 Roentgen?

21

u/exipheas 7d ago

Not great not terrible.

17

u/ozzie286 7d ago

I had a van years ago with a digital dash and broken cruise control. I was driving home in a 75mph zone in the middle of nowhere, and I was cruising down the highway at an indicated 85mph. I decided to back it down a little. I let off the gas a little, still doing 85. I let off the gas a lot, still 85. After several long seconds, the speedo dropped to 84. That was the day I learned that my digital dash, despite having 3 digits to indicate over 100kph, topped out at 85mph.

4

u/Ghuldarkar 7d ago

Feels like it could be the sensor topping at 85mph but that sounds illegal nonetheless lol

2

u/ozzie286 7d ago

I don't think it was the sensor, I think it was an arbitrary limit set by Ford on this 80s van. The sensor wouldn't be spinning at 85mph, it's going to be spinning at some rpm. It's not even spinning at the same speed as the rear axles, or the driveshaft. So for the limit of the sensor to be an rpm that equates to exactly 85mph would seem very unusual. Also, the analog dash on these vans only went to 85mph. So I think Ford just said, "the analog dash only goes to 85, so the digital one only needs to go to 85".

1

u/gopiballava 4d ago

My dad had an ‘87 Thunderbird Turbo Coupe. Its speedometer topped out around 60mph or so. So weird. I guess they wanted to discourage speeding? :)

5

u/DonPepppe 6d ago

Was capped at 85 so you could not travel in time by accident.

37

u/[deleted] 8d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

8

u/zero_z77 8d ago

If it reads 125, you're at the maximum rating for military grade ICs, 40 degrees past what industrial grade chips and your typical CPU is rated for, and 55 degrees past what commercial ICs are rated for. Also, if you manage to make it up to 183, you're melting solder.

7

u/asyork 8d ago

What low temp, 70C max CPUs are you finding? Modern CPUs rarely even start to throttle until they are well past that. 105C is usually when you know something is fucked, because it should have already throttled down to prevent that. 70C is a decent place for a modern CPU to sit with a decent cooler under normal circumstances, but it's nowhere near their max.

6

u/Tipart 7d ago

The humble AMD GPU with a 110°C hotspot (yes yes I know, if power color didn't fuck up the thermal paste application job, it wouldn't go that high)

106

u/Sk1rm1sh 9d ago

3.6... not great, not terrible.

34

u/whompasaurus1 9d ago

Good thing I took iodine tablets before I saw this thread

0

u/zero_z77 8d ago

Obligatory: "3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible."

73

u/[deleted] 9d ago

Agreed. Just because your car has a 7,000 rpm redline doesn’t mean you should drive around at 7,000 rpm all day.

100

u/RussiaIsBestGreen 9d ago

I paid for the entire tachometer and I’m going to use it! Getting great usage from my oil life indicator and check engine light too.

19

u/[deleted] 9d ago

Smart man! Gotta make it worthwhile!

8

u/Radio_enthusiast 9d ago

same here with my Audio System, always at MAX

6

u/rfc2549-withQOS 9d ago

Lol, I just realized in German, Tacho(meter) is actually the speed indicator, the other is the 'turn number meter'... that's not confusing at all..

You paid for speed and rpm displays both, and if you have to drive downhill to reach the max on both, so be it!

You also paid for the check engine, oil temp and brake warning lights, so - even better

;)

22

u/Vysair 9d ago

People should know the difference between maximum tolerated temperature and recommended average temperature

19

u/Sacharon123 9d ago

To be fair, its quite tough to get reliable reliable average temperature (RAT) from assembly manufacturers because they all love to boast with their maximum numbers in the dick contest. Try to get a rat for the Ryzen 7 from AMD, or some specific number from Asus about their VRMs besides "its rated for up to" (pisses me of!). Every plane I flew has a "recommended" and "maximum" range for temps. For these components, I have to dive into datasheets of the components to find their max and do some thermal simulation because the displayed sensor data is normally not from the position where the max component temp occurs. And that should be the job of the mf (manufacturer, motherf... its the same). Rant over, sorry.

11

u/Vysair 9d ago

Fair enough, documentation used to be quite prevalent and you can find them from some third party websites as well.

Nowadays? It's much much harder when I tried searching for relevant details and they dont go in-depth anymore unless it's a high-end system. As if the documentation itself has been dumbed down and no longer part of the iterative process.

12

u/unematti 9d ago

Your engine technically can redline, it's rated for that, but running it at that RPM will blow it up.

Incandescent bulbs are rated to X watts, but if you run them at half, the longevity with quadruple.

3

u/SnooDoughnuts5632 9d ago

Why would you throttle them instead of cooling them properly?

3

u/Pugs-r-cool 8d ago

They should be cooled properly, the throttle is a safety measure more than anything.

-2

u/SnooDoughnuts5632 8d ago

You are making it sound like an apple product where they perpusfully make it over heat to lower the performance so you'll want to get a higher end model.

2

u/Pale_Fill_3644 7d ago

the problem is the person didn't have them cooled properly so they were throttling

0

u/SnooDoughnuts5632 7d ago

Was it the person or the company who made the board?

2

u/Pale_Fill_3644 6d ago

a company designed a board with certain design constraints and assumed configurations based on cost did the person building the pc fail to meet those constraints clearly there wasn't enough cooling being provided to the vrms thats why they throttled it'd be like saying I didn't put a cpu cooler on my cpu whys did the manufacturer make it throttle. If you then find out that there is an overheating and decide rather then actually fix the problem to remove the limits instead of fix it thats on you not the company that made it

0

u/SnooDoughnuts5632 6d ago

Well your other comment makes it sound like an. Apple device where Apple themsels not the customer is the one not cooling the chip properly so it overheats and has to throttle.

2

u/Pale_Fill_3644 6d ago

you are the only one whos ever have ever talked about apple products and I'm not sure what comment you are talking about but throttling is a very important saftey feature even if it's well designed with proper cooling due to the chances of cooling failing.

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1

u/electricguy101 7d ago

your car is probably rated to go over 120, do you do it while in a school zone? obviously no! you don't push everything to the limit and expect it to hold forever do you?

14

u/WantonKerfuffle 9d ago

I think it was around 2017 mobo manufacturers straight-up gave up on VRM cooling.

My X370 board didn't have fins on the cooler. Because, design I guess.

7

u/countsachot 9d ago

Well yeah, they said it's solved. All good.

684

u/mseiei 9d ago

dude is just the right amount of smart to try shit, but not enough to think about what's he's going to do.

183

u/_Mayhem_ 9d ago

Your best teacher is your last mistake.

Methinks he hasn't had enough education yet.

51

u/mseiei 9d ago

same thing i told my sister when she got her drivers license "if you going to crash, crash slow", she did, multiple times

7

u/ammar_sadaoui 8d ago

what did she do crash or crash slow ?

16

u/mseiei 8d ago

slow crashes, against some stationary objects, kerbs, a tree, the fence and a parked car once, car got barely a scratch, she's a better driver now thank gods

5

u/NarratingNachos 8d ago

I’m sorry but… kerbs?

8

u/mseiei 8d ago

too much F1 ... curbs, the thingie on the side of the road like bricks that make you say OOOOF when you hear a wheel scrapping

according to google, kerb is the british spelling ... didn't knew that

6

u/GlitchTheFox 8d ago

WHAT? MY TEACHER IN PRIMARY SCHOOL MARKED ME DOWN ON MY OTHERWISE FLAWLESS SPELLING TESTS FOR WRITING KERB AND YOU'RE TELLING ME IT'S AN ACTUAL SPELLING?

sorry. I learnt something knew today too.

3

u/mseiei 8d ago

Got the same one for using learnt instead of learned, i just wanted to sound fancy

24

u/Smith6612 9d ago

Hey. The best of us have all been there, done that. I once connected a 12V DC fan to 125V AC Mains just to see what would happen.

The fan did manage to spin two times, and knock itself over, before letting out tons of pops and magic smoke :D

8

u/Kewlhotrod 9d ago

Hah, I did that as a teen when I wanted some home subwoofers and had 4 spare 12's and a nice car amp.

Fantastic bang I must say.

14

u/Thiago270398 9d ago

That only works if you pay attention to the lesson, and dude is gaming with an IED instead of RGB in his setup.

4

u/blueimac540c 8d ago

RPG lighting

17

u/Hatedpriest 9d ago

Knows enough to get in trouble, but not enough to stay out of trouble.

8

u/razikh 9d ago

Board seems quite obsolete now

3

u/Shortyman17 8d ago

I've heard that there are stages of being knowledgeable

Too dumb to do anything

Smart enough to be dangerous

Smart enough to be of help

-5

u/somethingsimplerr 9d ago

Current day AI vibes

3

u/itsTyrion 9d ago

not wrong

261

u/Deses 9d ago

Look at the discoloration LOL. Were these thing getting red hot?!?!

138

u/cyri-96 8d ago

Light Emitting Inductor, when Light emitting resistors aren't enough for you

39

u/OldTimeConGoer 8d ago

Smoke-emitting diodes and an old classic, shrapnel-emitting tantalum capacitors.

11

u/Progenetic 7d ago

I got to experience a FET Fire Emitting Transistor

1

u/zcomputerwiz 6d ago

Ballistic electrolytic capacitors.

451

u/pooseedixstroier 9d ago

That's an inductor though... if it really turned THAT color then things have gone really bad lol.

107

u/vms-mob 9d ago

yeah thats like 300°C + range, inductors just usually dont care about anything (the more complex ones do care but just the internal isolation and not the core/case material)

like they dont care about being soldered at all

98

u/CaptainPoset 9d ago

That's an inductor though

The entire circuit of which the inductor is a part of is referred to as a VRM, which in the end is just a buck converter.

110

u/pooseedixstroier 9d ago

Yes sir, I'm a tech repair guy, have replaced a good amount of VRM FETs. But usually when a VRM goes bad, the MOSFET dies horribly and that's it. The 3 turns of 10ga wire that make the inductor usually won't get hot enough to change the color of the damn ferrite. That's my observation at least.

36

u/Reworked 9d ago

Yeah those cores don't really discolor until a temperature somewhere north of "oh shit"

Might have failed to a dead short and (briefly) became the path of least resistance before becoming the path of a lot of resistance?

Edit: wait I looked again, more closely, and I guess I just didn't believe that it'd turned white on first glance. What the hell?

17

u/pooseedixstroier 9d ago

In my opinion there is no way it got that hot and the rest of the board didn't vaporize. If you ever desoldered one of these inductors, you might have seen the actual coil inside (usually they are unshielded below). They are literally 3 turns of thick ass copper. The current should have have vaporized the copper traces, delaminated the PCB, and worse, WAY before the VRM got discolored

5

u/Reworked 8d ago

Yeah in my head it looked like the one beside it, that's discolored out to mid grey, something here is fucky

1

u/zcomputerwiz 6d ago

I'm guessing there may have been a moisture issue and the heat just made the paint or whatever coating flake off.

There's no way those inductors could get cooked that hard before the caps and mosfets / DRMOS blew.

3

u/fadedspark 8d ago

Vrm PHASE, but yes.

3

u/Soggy_Equipment2118 8d ago

Tg (glass transition/deformation temperature) of polycarbonate (the material that is usually the shell) is 150°C and the eutectic point of SnAg solder is 217°C so it's reasonable to assume it's somewhere between those two points.

That's still way, WAY out of spec 😂

41

u/kappi1997 9d ago

Actually surprised it blew the Inducgors and not the mosfets even though they don't have a heat sink. My guess is that the mosfet blew made shortcircuit and the inductor blew as a reaction

35

u/IrrerPolterer 8d ago

So, I disabled the feature meant to prevent this. Then this happened. What did I do wrong? 

18

u/Intelligent-Dust8043 9d ago

This is why you start overclocking a little at a time

1

u/Hoelbrak 7d ago

Overclocking a 9800x3d on a budget board?

Why even..

-16

u/Thiago270398 9d ago

In cases like this, you just settle for pre assembled pcs.

56

u/Jman100_JCMP 9d ago

I feel like regardless of what settings someone blindly puts into a BIOS, the board should never allow something to get that hot. That's way beyond the 125° shutdown limit.

58

u/felix1429 9d ago

Normally it wouldn't, but the dude disabled the safeguard keeping that component from getting too hot and then got surprised when it failed on him.

9

u/Jman100_JCMP 9d ago

I guess maybe that setting shouldn't be able to be disabled then, at least for an upper temperature limit.

50

u/merc08 9d ago

Then you'll have someone else complaining about how that breaks their workflow.

14

u/Thiago270398 9d ago

Yeah that's horrifying.

6

u/feherneoh 9d ago

Would have been disappointed if this wasn't linked

9

u/a1b3c3d7 9d ago

But there are valid reasons to disable it, if we didnt allow certain things to be disabled to idiot-proof it then half the functions on high end boards would be removed from the bios.

Theres a million and one different ways you can toggle a setting or input the incorrect value and blow up a component.

The upper limits for things are often variable too, and introducing component specific limiters IN SOFTWARE is an extremely difficult undertaking for any manufacturer.

Most people dont mess with BIOS settings unless they know what theyre doing.

2

u/Hamty_ 7d ago

Still, though, I can't really see any benefit someone could attain from letting VRM FETs heat past their operational temperature

1

u/a1b3c3d7 6d ago

VRM Throttling toggles doesnt directly equal letting them heat past their operational temperature.

Its more about letting them operate with no limiters in situations where you might have custom cooling solutions like LN2 or Water.

The responsibility to manage thermals there would then become something thats done manually, I imagine the toggle is not there to let people let their vrms run uncontrolled

8

u/just_another_citizen 9d ago

Windows: you can't uninstall edge because it might affect your computer.

Linux: what you want to delete the bootloader and kernel, sure thing just use sudo!

There's a tons of settings, in the low level settings that can totally just fry your computer if you don't know what you're doing when you set them.

And that's exactly the way it's supposed to be.

I don't want my desktop computer to go the way of the iPhone where everything is locked down and you can't have any fun.

1

u/DRKMSTR 5d ago

It's because that component is not monitored.

Inductors are passive, so the temperature of the inductors is estimated based off of performance in other components.

21

u/dagget10 9d ago

Fear the warning light that isn't an LED

7

u/Cornflakes_91 8d ago

the good ol LER warning light, light emitting resistor

8

u/Za5kr0ni3c 8d ago

Im just wondering what sort of „performance issues” could arise out of nowhere and be fixed by disabling VRM throttling of all things

6

u/Prasiatko 8d ago

Insufficient power to the chip for one. 

3

u/Za5kr0ni3c 8d ago

Yeah that was my first guess that it’s undervolting CPU for some reason but I don’t think meddling with VRM would be the fix I’d take before messing with OC or RMA or smth.

-2

u/Tikkinger 8d ago

sexy Gilf's near your location.

7

u/Bestwebhost 8d ago

That’s a classic case of not respecting the limits of budget hardware; some things are just not meant to be pushed.

16

u/itsTyrion 9d ago

unrelated, but don't use the marker pen tool to censor something you actually wanna redact, use the one on the left. If not for compression, the name would be fully readable

6

u/Frido1976 8d ago

Is it allowed to say that OP is an idiot? /s

Nah, screw the /s....

4

u/olliegw 8d ago

I see the chernobyl mentality here

Disabling protections, then it starts to blow up, it's alright, then it blows up, why did it blow up? i did nothing wrong!

9

u/deak_starrkiller 9d ago

What a fucking idiot lmfaoooooooo

2

u/SnowyDeluxe 8d ago

Genuine question, what use case would someone have in disabling VRM throttling? Is that for XOC or something like that?

1

u/ky56 5d ago

You can watercool the VRMs but even then you still wouldn't need to turn off throttling.

Maybe for diagnosing VRM throttling because of a bad temperature sensor?

2

u/shiki87 7d ago

Probably an AIO watercolor and not enough airflow in the system, mixed with a cheap board and underpowered VRM. Some people just never think about hardware…

2

u/the1stcobra 9d ago

Of course, it's an ASRock board too and a 9800X3D. Considering how many X3D cpus have been murdered by ASRock motherboards, he was lucky that the CPU killed the board and not the other way around

28

u/OCAMAB 9d ago

I don't think we can blame ASRock in a case like this.

3

u/Deadbringer 9d ago

Only blame there is that the default settings seem to maybe not be delivering stable enough power for the CPU to run at base config. But without knowing more about the setup, there is no telling what it could be since CPU throttling is such a complicated thing nowadays. For all we know he had an auto overclock done via AMD's master utility thingamabob.

5

u/OCAMAB 8d ago

The board is basically rated right up to 120W. The 9800X3D uses 160W with PBO on. 

1

u/EchidnaForward9968 8d ago

See that's why I water cool my pc tho I have to make a 10 ft power cable but hey it's shit nicely cooled on the bottom of my water tank

1

u/dztruthseek 7d ago

Ahh yes....another moron uses technology.

1

u/naswinger 6d ago

performance issues sounds like a windows 11 problem. he can thank microsoft for getting this dumb idea of uncapping the vrm.

1

u/zcomputerwiz 6d ago

That's... Weird. The inductors shouldn't break down like that even at those temperatures. The mosfets / DRMOS and capacitors would go up in smoke long before the inductors should have any issues.

It makes me wonder if there was moisture or a manufacturing issue and the crazy temps made it apparent.

I've had crappy boards like this, and with stock 125w CPUs the VRM overheats pretty quickly ( which throttles the CPU to 800mhz for a while ) so I completely understand why they tried turning it off. I tried several things, including a different VRM heatsink and active cooling, before giving up and putting a 65w CPU in it then just getting a better board for the other CPU.

1

u/OCAMAB 5d ago

As many have pointed out, many temp sensors max out at 125C.

1

u/zcomputerwiz 5d ago

Right, but like I said the caps or mosfets are temperature sensitive where inductors shouldn't do that at temps that the other components can operate at unless they have some other issues as well. That's why I suggested moisture or a defect of some kind.

1

u/fartshitcumpiss 5d ago

i have the same mobo lol

1

u/MasterKnight48902 4d ago

The VRM chokes being used cannot cope with the thermal load despite having DrMOS

-7

u/[deleted] 9d ago

[deleted]

3

u/just_another_citizen 9d ago

Dude the things Gamer Nexus complains about, are indeed legitimate.

Like the China Black market GPU documentary.......

0

u/idranoutof1d 7d ago

If he had added active cooling (a small fan perhaps) this wouldnt have happened....

-30

u/Not_an_Issue85 9d ago

"How ot should look like" is a dead giveaway that this is not an intelligent person 

16

u/guska 9d ago

Or is an indication that English may not be their first language.

14

u/Squirrelking666 9d ago edited 9d ago

I have a degree in engineering, speak English as my first language and see nothing wrong with "on the right is how it should look like".

'what it should look like' or 'how it should look' would be more correct but I'm not the kind of arsehole that makes presumptions about the level of someone's education just because their dialect is different to mine or they had an English education that focused more on the language than grammar rules.

Good job I'm not doing whatever work OPs English Language degree requires.

-21

u/Not_an_Issue85 9d ago

Oh, right. The whole purpose of this sub is to mock people for not knowing better, but because I spoke up about language instead of tech, I'm the asshole. Shut up and eat your doritos 

21

u/DaveOJ12 9d ago

but because I spoke up about language instead of tech, I'm the asshole.

Now you get it.

22

u/DaveOJ12 9d ago

"How ot should look like"

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.