What would cause a card/pin blow?

Story starts with me buying a Shapphire Radeon 9800 Pro from another company around seven eight months ago.

One problem or another, rangeing from corrupt screens to not even powering on the card has been RMA'd now 3 times. The last time was before Christmas with the new RMA card being given to my little bro as a Christmas Present after I got fed up and bough a 6800.

Now a couple of weeks ago my brother phoned me rather worried, a smell of smoke and again a screen full of corrput graphics. Tested the card first and it was at fault.

He sent it home from Uni to myself so I could once again RMA the damn thing. Of course now the company are refusing anything but a repair, which I dont want.

Anyhow my question being:

On futher checking the card the 'y' power cord and the 4th power pin on the card have both been chared rather badly, and I was wondering what and how this might happend on a gfx?

the powersupply would probably be to blame for that. though im not sure at all. a radeon 9800 requires at least 350 watt psu. if you ahve a generic 350 psu unit it might be to blame for the badthings happening to the radeon 9800.
out of curisity, why wouldnt u wnat to ahve them repair it?

Presumably we're talking the yellow cable? It'll be charred because too much current was running down it probably. Perhaps the card shorted and caused that, or perhaps the cabling couldn't handle the amount of current the card was drawing.

i'd imagine he doesn't want it repaired cause hes had so many problems with it he'd rather not have one at all...!

if he rma's it hed still get the card only a new card, and personally id rather have it repaired since in my opinion tehy will fix teh problem and re-check it for other problems, and i think it would have a less chance of having a problem.