My friend's newly bought Gigabyte m/board can not work anymore as we found out that the Intel ICH5 Chipset on the board was damaged/burnt (a tiny hole and burnt mark on the IC).


How the board got damaged:

He tried to transfer photos from digital camera to PC via USB interface. He setup the file transfer as follows:
1) Like usual, PC was ON.
2) Digital camera was turned OFF.
3) USB cable was connected to the USB port (at front panel of the PC).
4) Another end of USB cable was connected to the digital camera.
5) Press the 'POWER' button on the camera.

When 1 ~ 4 was performed, everything was FINE. However, when (5) was carried out, he told me that he heard 'IC cracking' sound and got some 'IC-burnt' smell. After that, he found a hole (tiny hole) on top of a chipset (i.e. Intel FW82801EB).

Pls advise why this happened. We think the incident happened because of a short-circuit between the Vbus and GND. But how both lines were shorted? For your information, he managed to transfer photos to PC couple times before this incident.


Quote Originally Posted by Ruslan
Fuse? It is a small chip (rectangular),component, soldered on the PCB for preventing damage to USB or Keyboard chips because of overloading... Usually marked on PCB as "F1, F2, F3" and so on, have black colour (originally) or be painted in green colour (sometimes) and should be having zero resistance, if good. Could be burnt, if someone shorted "+5V" line of the USB connector to the "ground" line... could be shorted inside the camera's tiny USB connector, for example...
I got the quoted message from this forum. What actually happened at the digital camera when the POWER button was pressed? I'm interested in the comment by Ruslan "could be shorted insides the camera's tiny USB connector"? How would the tiny connector contribute to this incident? Because the connection was not setup properly (e.g. the connector was not pushed deep enough into the camera USB port?)?

After the incident, I tested the camera and cable with my computer. And, I had no problem to transfer photos to my PC, meaning the camera and the cable were still OK. Really weird. And really hope someone could explain.