damage from too powerful card

[ryan7777]

Hi I'm wondering if some one could describe for me what
kind of damage happens to your PC/mother board when you install a graphics card that's too powerful for your
power supply to handle and some sort of damage does
occur. I've read people describing how you could
potentially 'fry your system'.

I assume that means the mother board or is it the power
supply that gets taxed? Or both? Does it do something
like damage components like hard-drive or CPU too?
'Could those hypothetically be salvaged from a damaged system?

I'm sure there are varrying degrees of potenial damage
but would like to know what and how that damage might
happen.

Thanks.

 

[-RockMan-]

Hi I'm wondering if some one could describe for me what
kind of damage happens to your PC/mother board when you install a graphics card that's too powerful for your
power supply ?
but would like to know what and how that damage might
happen.

Thanks.

Honestly if you have a graphics card thats abit too much for your current psu meaning underpowered, it will most likely not boot.
Also both graphics card and motherboard have a few safety mechanisms to keep that from happeniing if it ever arose.

There is one very possible way you could accidently do damage to you system, and that is by damaging one of your capacitors on your card, leading to immediatr trouble on your system i anything should be hot and over heating.

 

[ryan7777]

What if your card called for 40amps from the power supply but the power supply only
gave out 17..would that effect just the power supply or more? Hypothetically how might that effect the system?

 

[-RockMan-]

What if your card called for 40amps from the power supply but the power supply only
gave out 17..would that effect just the power supply or more? Hypothetically how might that effect the system?

Depends on how you look at it and which graphics card you got.
Lets say your running on a core2duo machine, you have a GTX280, 4gbs of ram and one sata hdd.
Based on your system needs, if the system is power effiencent you won't expect much problems except for the psu wearing out within 6 months or so.

If your system was power hungry and needed the juice, yes your asking for problems and something might short out.
Have a look at Antec,corsair and a few other psus from online stores and look at the customer reviews with good feedback rating by others.

That will pretty much give you a answer to what your looking, sometimes it can be the users fault by building stuff that won't work.
Other times, it can be the manufacturer, its 2 way deal on hardware issues if you look at everything closely.

 

[ryan7777]

Thanks for the feedback...but what I'm wondering is when you say "something might short out"...What exactly do people mean by that? Is that the power supply that shorts out or does something happen to the voltage going through the mother board? I guess this isn't something people usually ask.

 

[-RockMan-]

Thanks for the feedback...but what I'm wondering is when you say "something might short out"...What exactly do people mean by that? Is that the power supply that shorts out or does something happen to the voltage going through the mother board? I guess this isn't something people usually ask.

When people use the word short in tech talk, it can mean the piece of hardware died when something popped or crackeled.
It can be the hardware cannot start up fully due to situations that is preventing it from coming on fully.
One example is incorrectly installing a motherboard to a case, if anything you kill it, or it will refuse to come on depending on how new it is.