Reports from several users are pouring in claiming a section of their ASUS ROG Z690 Hero motherboards specially designed for Alder Lake CPUs to have burned up. Some have experienced an unknown error that popped up when lacking a charred section of the board.
A user complained on the ASUS support forum with a photo of a section close to the DIMM slots all burnt up. According to the user, the motherboard worked perfectly fine before the accident.
In a Reddit thread, an owner of the motherboard asked what would be the possible reason behind a smoke coming out of a certain part of the motherboard.
“Everything worked great for a day or two (no memtest done), I may have heard a clanky noise and assumed it was the fab clip from the air cooler being too close to the top case fan and chose to review it the next day after a full shutdown and restart. The next day I get stuck on the boot with QCODE 53 and QLED Orange (first time) and noticed a penny sized burn mark under the bottom right of the QLED, burnt to a crisp almost (top side, lot of soot) and melting the QCODE box a little.”
It has been concluded from the pictures provided that this might be due to a backward installation of the key capacitor on the motherboard during the assembly process, thus the polarity of the capacitor reversed. Reversing the polarity may have resulted in the motherboards burning.
It is highly recommended to all those who recently made a purchase to be on a safer side and check the orientation of the capacitor.
Via Reddit