Thank you Dark Mantis for the assitance and warm welcome.
Not that it said anything in the users guide about max load on the fan header, does it?
The fault was with the fan seizing up and shorting causing a massive power draw, has been running nice and stable for quite a while before that.
Fan makers fault
Could be I shouldnt have used that old fan I had laying around, saving gets expensive sometimes.
Used the CPU_fan to drive a cooling fan for my WC rad.
Btw, moved the load to Sys_fan2 and using speedfan to get PWM by software. Fan power draw is max 0.4 amps at 12v (approx 5 W max) same as before incident.
Unsafe?Strange how sysfan2 header actually gets more RPM even tho it says in manual that its 5v, humm. Wonder what speedfan does to it?
6h of gaming later, everything is stable.
Loving the board tho.
Any idea where I could get a peek at the service manual for this particular board, the damage seems to be very limited.
If I had some directions where to look I that would help immensly.
If I find the circuit and component(s) I can repair it. Too bad there isnt anything visible
I hope its just a track that gave out like you said, thats reasonably easy, will take the board out and inspect in a day or 2 when I have time.
Must be visible damage to have made that loud POP. Cant tell you what a relief and suprise it was to see the system still running and perfectly fine seconds later, just and only that gave up.
Kudos to Gigabyte for the build, nothing else is effected.
Thanks Dark Mantis.