[Thermodyne]

But at what temp will it combust? Most of the dust inside a PC is from the local environment. In a school environment that would be mostly carpet fiber, ceiling fibers, chalk and human misc. like skin, hair, and clothing. Not a real good source of tinder. Also, the insides of a PC are very fire resistant. That’s one of the reasons that they are so hard on the environment.

Let’s look at this from an informed point of view.

First, did you actually see the fire, or the charred PC lab?

Second, how would OC’ing cause the fire? The CPU is long dead before it reaches 200c; the power supply has built in thermal protection. Newer CPU’s have thermal protection too. And there are no high voltage components on the mainboard. At best, the alleged OC would have been modest, so that the systems would have been stable enough to run for an extended period of time. OCing involves bumping up the multiplier and or the Front side Buss frequency. If possible, you will also want to bump up the Vcore a tenth of a volt or even 5 tenths. None of this is the stuff fires are made from.

Now some point’s of reality. Most schools buy commercial off the shelf PC’s. You aren’t going to do much OC’ing on them. At best they will have a FSB jumper with 66, 100, and 133MHz settings. They might also have some settings for the memory. But for the sake of conversation, we will assume that these were custom OC’able systems. These would also be built to operate safely at their most aggressive settings. In the real world, we kill parts when we start v-modding boards and cards. I seriously doubt that the teacher let the students start bypassing circuits with 1000 ohm trimmers and such. So let’s assume that the system was OC’ed and overheated. It would have shut down long before it got hot enough to ignite dust, unless something was done to actually cause a fire. Magnesium filament and flammable liquid wired to a NS relay would be the easy way, but again I doubt this could happen in a school and not be found out.

And lastly, lots of peeps here have had system shutdowns caused by accumulated dust. They don’t catch fire; they just shut down or lock up. PC are basically fire proof, the plastic won’t even sustain a flame. Until recently, the insides were coated with a fire retardant dust. Many of the components vent fluorocarbons at high temps. They will smoke and stink profusely, but seldom if ever burn.