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Latent is probably not the right word.

I dropped a short metal scrap on a running video card. Obviously not a very good idea. A small spark was seen, and the PSU automatically shut down itself.

I removed the scrap, fiddled with the PSU to reset the breaker, and rebooted the thing. Everything seemed to be working fine, and a short stress test with FurMark produced what I could only see as normal benchmarks with no artifacting.

I'm still extremely worried though that I somehow caused irreparable damage to the video card (I'm not really worried about the PSU). Did I inadvertently kill some parts of the circuits? Will it cause problems later down the road?

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    if furmark passes ok then there is no initial problem, it could fail in the future, who knows, only time can tell. IMHO
    – chmod
    Aug 23, 2012 at 18:33

1 Answer 1

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It sounds like you shorted a power supply rail to ground, and the power supply detected the sudden surge in current and shut itself off. If that's what happened, the video card was most likely not affected.

If the video card still works, I'd continue to use it until the wheels fall off (or you buy another computer or upgrade the video card, which will probably happen before the original video card fails).

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  • The video card is one day old, which has me even more worried, because I can't even detect a performance drop. Your answer will help me sleep though.
    – Orhym
    Aug 23, 2012 at 18:43

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