Dangerous PC cases by Aerocool - did anyone have one similar?

[Sprinterfreak]

I'm actually reading my c't magazin.
The article is about lately prevalent in flames leavened PC cases from the manufacturer Aerocool.
Strictly speaking, the case "StrikeX ST" is said to have recently lit up to increased residential fires.

Does anyone have such a housing or that  SATA docking board, responsible for the fires,  for a teardown?
I don't have one but sounds interesting for a bit of Taiwanese bashing... :-)

For reference:
http://ct.de/yngm
http://www.tomshardware.de/aerocool-strikex-st-gehause-feuer-brand,testberichte-241497.html

Regards

[Falcon69]

Interesting. Lots of posts on internet of this happening.  It's not isolated to just one person it seems.

[elgonzo]

Wtf is that? What can become so hot to melt the plastics? Was that a case fan running hot?

[Falcon69]

no. seems there is some electronic failure in the hard drive swap area.  Here's another pic.

It's a bad picture, but you can clearly see the circuit board and wires melted.

[elgonzo]

I have seen SATA connectors being badly molten due to defective PSUs (with TVS diodes of the connected HDDs popped from the board), but it catching fire and somehow igniting and melting the surrounding stuff at this scale is truly something new. Even when assuming that the PSU did not shutdown, the sheer area of damage is remarkable... and scary...

[SteveyG]

I have seen SATA connectors being badly molten due to defective PSUs (with TVS diodes of the connected HDDs popped from the board), but it catching fire and somehow igniting and melting the surrounding stuff at this scale is truly something new. Even when assuming that the PSU did not shutdown, the sheer area of damage is remarkable... and scary...

Well you fit a power supply with >500W output and there's a serious possibility of some heating...

[richms]

I have seen graphics cards with a melted up molex power connector on them.

Thats the problem with pulling large currents thru many paralleled connectors, when they start to go, you end up with one of them taking all the current and they melt up. The leads on power supplied arent usually the best quality and I dont know what the insertion rating on those molex plugs are, but with the third party ones on PSUs often being a tight fir you have to rock them around so much that I expect that is when the damage to the contacts occurs.

[rsjsouza]

I have seen graphics cards with a melted up molex power connector on them.

Thats the problem with pulling large currents thru many paralleled connectors, when they start to go, you end up with one of them taking all the current and they melt up. The leads on power supplied arent usually the best quality and I dont know what the insertion rating on those molex plugs are, but with the third party ones on PSUs often being a tight fir you have to rock them around so much that I expect that is when the damage to the contacts occurs.

My motherboard (Gigabyte Extreme EX58) has a partially damaged main ATX power supply molex connector due to a low quality power supply: months of bad contact partially melted the plastic and partially corroded two 5V contacts.

However, to reach the point of combustion something must have really gone wrong here... Perhaps flammable wiring insulation? Flammable X/Y caps or transformer insulation on the Power Supply?

[SeanB]

SATA power leads are common as well for cooking. I pulled one out this week, no wonder the DVD drive was not working, though because the motherboard had a dozen or more bulged capacitors I will probably not be bothering replacing it. Nice E8400 core 2 duo there though, I might just do it for practise, though it is a power hog.