Blackmagic Forum

Has anyone else had their older Decklink SDI cards fail in a spectacular manner? This is the second card I've had (in two different machines) where the component just to the left of the U27 marking (between the two chips) has burnt and wiped out the card. All of my modern cards are cruising along without issue but was just wondering if I should start planning on replacing the rest of these that I have.

I have about 12 of the Blackmagic SDI cards and none of them have gone fireworks on me.
You have actually had a fire in there!

Are you sure they were not touching something next to it?

That was my thoughts with the first one, although there were no signs of anything touching/dangling when I opened up the machine. I personally built out the system the second card fried in (it's based off an HP Z400 workstation) - the closest thing to this card is another Decklink SDI in an adjacent slot. I have all the machines installed in a data center environment with a large UPS keeping the voltage stable throughout the facility.

It’s a little difficult to see what component has ignited - but a failure mode of ceramic capacitors is short.
To me - that looks like a shorted capacitor.

Bad handling during assembly or bad batch of capacitors or physical damage to a component could cause this.

Did the computer fail to boot after the fire ? And perhaps recover when the card was removed ?
If so - this would indicate a shorted power rail on the card.

It happened overnight - I was doing my morning checks and found the machine was powered off with a four-blink error code (power error). I turned the machine back on and it came up fine but the card was no longer visible. Swapped the dead card with a Decklink Recorder and was back in business. There's one more Decklink SDI card in that machine and I have three more in other boxes at the facility. It does look like a ceramic capacitor.