7mo ago

'Black smoke filled the room': Reddit user says their Gigabyte mouse spontaneously combusted 'with large flames' and now the manufacturer is taking a look

www.pcgamer.com

Yikes.

5 comments

Seems fake. Quoting a comment from the linked thread:
I call bullshit, not only is the rest of your desk dry and pristine which rules out a fire bottle or even water dumped on it to extinguish, the bottom face of the mouse is so intact the label is readable despite the entire top being charred, and the desk and desk pad under the mouse also being melted. It’s also melted and not charred, and it’s melted from the top down not the inside out
All modern usb ports have overcurrent protection and the mouse has a fuse in it, specifically to prevent this exact scenario.
I’m being a bitch here but I think you were playing with fire or a soldering iron and didn’t realize your desk was honeycomb shitboard so it caught way faster and deeper than you expected, and you melted the mouse to see if gigabyte would get you a free desk.
- My first thought was that there's no way a motherboard should supply enough power to the USB port for something that dramatic. Maybe theoretically possible with a dedicated USB charger or some sort of USB-C Power Delivery port, but pretty much every standard Type-A Port on a PC will be limited to 5V and either 1 or 2.4 amps. Nowhere near enough for this. Even if something went wrong it would be a barely visible puff of smoke.
  I do see that this is an optical mouse. So maaaaybe something with the lense and laser happened that could cause a bit of a scorch mark to the mousepad? But in the pictures you can see the area around the lense is completely untouched and most of the damage is actually on the top of the mouse.
- Not to play devil's advocate but I have learnt to take even the most plausible Reddit comments with a grain of salt.
- you can see unsoldered headphone or amp connectors in the background. Normal people don't keep those just lying around. So I don't think the soldering comment is too far off mark.
  Also the whole post doesn't make sense. OP barely responds to anyone. In the stuff he does respond with it makes even less sense. And yeah you can see the melted plastic in the picture so it's pretty clear where the mouse was sitting when it melted. I'm guessing OP removed the mouse and then torched even more of the desk to make it look believable, but forgot about the bottom of the mouse.
I'm also calling bullshit. There's no way the wires used to supply power to the mouse could supply enough current to do that much damage. The wires would have melted.