You generally figure it out when you're about 10. My father would launch me and my maroon and creme Monkey Wards 24" bike down the driveway. It had enough slope I didn't have to pedal. Eventually I made it to the garage and had the physics down pat.
Close to 40 years and many bikes later I took one of those MSF courses and the instructor explained exactly what I was doing. Screwed me up for a while. I figured you look left, you go left without thinking 'now I'll push the left bar to the right.'
Of course if you think about what you're doing walking down the street, you may fall on your face. Science is nice and all, as far as it goes.
So your thinking that the water carried the +12V or -12V to a part that expected only a lower voltage? And then passed enough current for a capacitor to heat up and explode?
I still find it hard to believe.
I guess maybe some tiny capacitor the coupled audio in the on board audio circuit?
Some of the R9 280x have two 2x4 pin PCIe power connectors. The OPs board is one of the bodged ones, where the PCB has holes for two 2x4, but the board is populated with one 2x3 and one 2x4. The board VBIOS must be programmed with an appropriate power limit, if the board has power management.
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The +12V input side, likely uses an LC filter to help prevent switching noise from the GPU, from getting back into the ATX supply. In this picture, the layout is unrolled in linear fashion so you can see the LC filtering the +12V coming in. On another card boardview I could find, one of those inductors is rated 21A, the other was rated 16A (as some boards use a 2x3 and a 2x4, so the inductors are allowed to be different).
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But the capacitors are also close to their WVDC, running at nominally 12V with a 16V rating. If there was any kind of surge effect, the rail voltage across the cap could rise above 12V.
As for the adapter that Igorslab is testing, this is a bad idea, because ATX supplies have a limit as to how much capacitance they can drive, before they lose control loop stability. This would be why those little toys would not be using all the capacitance money could buy. As an example of a number (don't use this), the value might be 5000uF on the thing the ATX supply is driving. When a motherboard designer "sprinkles" bulk decap on the mobo (like near PCIe slots), they cannot exceed that kind of number. Peripherals have to follow some sort of rules as well. Even USB items, like flash keys, have a limit on allowed bypass caps. (100uF sag protection on the mobo, 10uF max on a USB key to prevent an inrush problem on a shared rail.)
Such a cap (the ruined one), is for all practical purposes running off +12V and GND, and cares not about water sprinkles. Maybe you could have electrolysis to eat the cap body, but as far as charging the cap to some illegal value, probably not.
I recently bought a PoE switch from eBay. It had been damaged by water ingress and the current flow was sufficient to start a fire inside it. I know it was water because of the rust on the inside of the steel case and I know there had been a fire because of the charred pcb and components and soot on the inside of the case. I did get a refund without any problems once I sent photographs - despite the "no returns" statement in the listing.
Nah, you can drive more power than you're supposed to through those plugs. They just wear out quicker (oxidizing, then voltage drop, then crash the card). I've set one to 1.5 times the standard max current, and run it flat out 24/7. I change the connectors every 4 months. Sometimes I just solder wires straight onto them.
But they never solved the problem of the glass breaking when people photocopied their buttocks.
I never saw that happeneing at my work, but I have seen people photocopying blank paper. The reason? You had to pay for paper but the photocopying was free!
No, they didn't charge employees, they charged departments.
So did I, but some didn't.
I don't think many companies even allow beer, let alone give it away free!
Agreed, I was charged £160 for just the part before labour for a brake caliper I ended up buying for £30 online including postage from Eurocarparts. The same make! That garage isn't where I go anymore. And they're in shit from the DVLA for something else they tried to do to me - "your [just replaced elsewhere] handbrake is hardly working at all sir", when I could cause it to lock the wheels going at 30mph, and prevent the engine from turning those wheels from a standstill.
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