How does stuff "fry" ?
 

I'm aware that for some things, they won't start if they are not grounded or grounded improperly. I've seen this happen a lot, it's just fundamental electronics.

I also know on cheap hardware, capacitors can burst. I've seen a lot of cheap power supplies filled with cat hair that have destroyed capacitors. Like Lasereth said in the other thread, I think it was him at least, the PSU is a very underrated component.


But my question is, how does stuff permanently fry all of a sudden? I had a nice GeForce 6600GT back in the day and it worked great for a year or two. I am always careful when I work my my machines - I wear rubber-soled sneaks and always have my hand on a metal part of the case to ground myself. But once and a while it seems like a component just "dies" - no exploded capacitors, no improper grounding, it's just "fried" and I can't figure out why.

Power fluctuations and heat cause a lot of problems that can fry something randomly.

Rubber-soled shoes are good to protect yourself from being electricuted but they help with building up static charge as the body can't ground itself.
If you are often working with sensitive components then a anti-static bracelet might be a good investment.

Yours
Zweiblumen

I suppose that makes sense. I figured that it insulates me from generating MORE charge. I mean, i feel like wearing fuzzy slippers while fixing a computer is probably the worst thing haha. But like I said, I always have a hand touching the metal part of the case, and I take extra caution to not touch the PCB and grab components by non-conducting parts. Then I see kids just take shit out and put their hands all over the solder joints on the back sides of the PCB and nothing happens. Go figure.

Yeah, I've noticed heat causes a LOT of issues. Electronics can be obnoxiously heat sensitive.

Well, think about what we mean when we say an electronics component 'fries' - sometimes it's a bad capacitor (or multiple bad caps, since there's often redundancy). Sometimes it's some sort of physical fatigue - like a broken connection between a chip and the board. Often it's because a chip or other part overheats, and essentially melts and burns. Just like a fuse in your car, any electrical circuit gets hotter the more juice you put through it. When it gets too hot, it melts, and blam, dead. Same thing happens in a microprocessor - maybe the power supply puts out too much voltage, or a surge comes through the power supply, or phone/ethernet line. Or the pathways in the cpu itself degrade, or the thing gets too hot because of a cooling issue (fan goes out, etc).

Bad caps. Metal migration. Shorting from a failed component, or as stated an open circuit because of heat over time weakening a solder joint.