The Crater in my Video Card

This story begins a days back when I had been playing The Witcher for a bit. I hadn't gamed on my laptop in a while (ps3 took over), but these are my specs, so it can handle a few polygons:
Alienware M15x (2008 vintage)
4GB RAM (only 3GB registers)
Core 2 Duo T9300
Nvidia 8800m GTX

I noticed some problems right away. The computer crashed in about 30-40 minutes, and the thing would get hhhooottt right above the video card. I had the back of the laptop propped up for airflow (don't have my laptop cooler with me), but it hit me that I probably had a dust monster. Dug up rivatuner and checked out my temps in gaming....they peaked at 100C once I got it loaded up. Frightening. 3 years and no cleaning? Not good.
I decided to redo the thermal compound on the video card heatsink while I was at it. Sure enough, giant dustwad. Cleared it out and took off the heatsink. Alienware had definitely overdone it on the thermal compound and I was mourning the money I spent (read: probably wasted) on the laptop when I noticed something odd about the heatsink...



...hmmmm. Why does that look like there was a fi....WHAT IS THAT?



Whatever that was, it's 'sploded. I can only identify RAM and the processing unit, so I have no idea what it is. Oddly enough, the card still runs just fine. Now that I've got the heatsink back on and the fan cleared the GPU stays muccchh cooler (idle at 49C, down from 70C). I can still play games at high resolutions with decent frame rates, so the card seems ok.
Does anyone know what that little blown up part would be used for? I'm not too worried about it since I am aiming to get a new computer soon, but I was just curious about how this little guy keeps working.

Thanks!
Meow.

 

wow that's beyond everythin i seen with the 8XXX-9XXX serie

it looks like a surface mounted component juste bowed up from the look of it i would say a resistor

 

Yeah, I'm fairly surprised to say the least. Whatever happened, it burned clear through to the board it was stuck to. Gone now! I don't ever remember smelling anything too, so I have no idea when this could have happened.

 

hmmmm...Idle temps are lower, but as soon as I oaded Borderlands, the temperature shot up to 100C again before I had time to minimize.

An electrical engineer friend of mine said there looks to be redundancy in the transistor, but that one is definitely dead.

 

Some components may seem redundant since you think that your computer still functions properly without it. For example it may be part of a module which prevents voltage fluctuations for the GPU.

If there is no voltage fluctuation you will not notice its absence. However in the case of a fluctuation that may burn up your GPU. So even though your graphics card run fine today it is not good for the future anyways.


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Even though things seem to be okay now, what's worse is something caused that component to loose the magic smoke. I'd report it to Dell ASAP and tell them what happened and that whatever caused it is a potential fire hazard.

That blown part definitely looks like it is part of a input voltage regulation circuit or the GPU's (dedicated) power supply circuit. Probably a capacitor, and six of them are probably in parallel for redundancy sake. But still...something went beyond it's rated specifications otherwise you wouldn't see a failure like that.

 

Yeah, I'm sure it had something to do with the ridiculous temp stresses I've been (inadvertently) putting it under. As for Dell, this thing is way out of warranty. I've looked into the cost of replacing the card on my own, and it isn't pretty ($200 at least). If worse comes to worst, I'll just switch to on board graphics and let this be my 5 pound netbook...

 

You could probably just sell it for parts while it's still working and look at getting something new. Although I don't think you could sell the board like that