Help - Motherboard (literally) blew up!

[Creeky123]

Recently posted about a build I was putting together, well today was the day:

Corsair AX1600i
Aorus Master TRX40
3960X
Meshify S2

Before building in the case I quickly checked to make sure that the CPU and memory were being recognized and I was posting to bios. That was fine so I built the rest of the machine in the case.

Powered the machine on with a keyboard, USB drive and logitech wireless reciever.

I’d just finished creating a partition for windows after first boot (maybe 5/6 mins on time) and there was a bang and a capacitor head flew across the floor.

Does anyone have any guess as to whether this is a bad board, or whether it was something plugged into the board that caused the issue.

The capacitor that blew was very close to the USB3 header on the board, but I’m no electrical engineer so can’t say for sure.

Picture links attached:

picture of blown cap
picture during build - doesn’t look like cap is upside down

location of capacitor on board

Thanks for the help guys.

[MisteryAngel]

We can’t really help with this.
You could contact the shop you boaght it from.
Or contact Gigabyte about this.
But this is pretty rare.

Of course we don’t know how you pluged in things.
But i guess just a bad example of the board.

[ChrisBozeman]

This is almost certainly just a manufacturing defect. I’ve plugged all kinds of weird hardware into all manner of motherboards over the past 30 years, and I’ve never seen this once.

[Creeky123]

Right… I’ve building since the 3dfx days and have had the capacitor on one msi gpu but never a mobo.

From what I can recall from school this can happen if they are put in the wrong way around but the picture from before would indicate that it wasn’t.

[BigBodZod]

I would RMA the motherboard for sure.

I’ve had this happen once when a PS Unit failed on me and surged the entire computer, I lost all but the spinning RUST drives

[MisteryAngel]

Electronics can always fail.