can a bad video card damage the MOBO?

[FluorideInMyWater]

just wondering if a bad video card or even bad memory could damage a mobo...or is it always the opposite direction?

TIA!!!!

[blazeaglory]

I always wondered that myself. I could see if maybe the certain damaged components caused some kind of power surge?

Did you take out the damaged components and see if the MOBO works?

[FluorideInMyWater]

i did.......i think it was a damaged video card but not completely sure.....just wondering if putting in a bad video card or other accessory would damage the mobo

[billofrights]

Not normally, no.

[stilly]

just wondering if a bad video card or even bad memory could damage a mobo...or is it always the opposite direction?

TIA!!!!

In all honesty I think this is one of the mysteries in computers.

CAN IT? Who knows what could happen to the card and cause it to jack a mobo, will it most likely do it? Nope. In 25 years I have never seen a video card jack a mobo, BUT perhaps it is because of how it flows, the power comes from the wall to the PSU to the mobo/graphics/drive/fan. Power USUALLY only flows one way (generally speaking) so you have a MUCH greater chance of the mobo jacking your card or the PSU jacking the mobo or video card then the video card jacking the mobo. This is what I have seen and this is how I have come to understand it. BUT, usually the mobo does not do anything, USUALLY when I see it, the PSU is the one with the knife and the PSU is the culprit that will jack others. I have not seen a mobo break a video card, but I have seen a psu jack a mobo, video card, and hd in one swipe. I even had a psu that killed any mobo it was plugged into. I tested it on three working mobos before I came to that conclusion... I would have kept going but I was out of mobos; it was the funniest thing though.

[NorCalXJ]

Could damage the video card slot.

[Dontlook72]

Mobo should be fine if a vid card goes bad. Very rarely will it cause a mobo to fail. But have heard of some people saying their vid card did fried their mobo but could never verify it.

I've had a vid card blow a PSU, which in turn fried the cpu and that fried the mobo. That's what you get when you don't check to make sure your PSU will support your new vid card.....Why does my room smell like electrical smoke...

[Merc1138]

Could damage the video card slot.

Even just damaging the slot is kinda difficult. Physical damage could happen of the bracket on the videocard(some cards do get kind of heavy) wasn't properly attached and it was shipped and bounced around.

If something caused a short on the card, it could damage the board. But odds are that whatever caused such a short(conductive liquid being spilled on it?) would have killed the motherboard anyway. Slow leak from a hose fitting attached to a radiator sitting above a videocard maybe?

You could also wreck it by using some extreme cooling methods and having condensation problems(peltier, phase change, liquid nitrogen, etc.) and failing to properly insulate the hardware. But by then, you already knew what you were getting yourself into. Odds are also in this scenario that the videocard cost more than the motherboard anyway.

I've had cards go bad and put them into other systems to verify if it was the card or motherboard(faster than swapping a motherboard when you have another computer available), and I've never had a bad card fry a motherboard in another PC as a hobby, or while I was working as a tech professionally, nor heard about such an occurrence from anyone else in the shop.