That is not a fire. A component can easily blow up without a fire starting. there is generally a lack of fuel source.
40+ years of working with electronics says otherwise.
Anything that carries a current can burn. Anything with an electrolytic capacitor can pop, and quite enthusiastically so. Anything hot enough can carry a flame. Sometimes it doesn't even take a defective component. It could be a sparking connector, a power switch with a dodgy contact so it starts to arc, a solder joint might have been just a bit too dry, an elco could be off tolerance, a misplaced cable could rub off insulation and short/spark/arc - the list is endless.
However, in all those years I have only ever seen a computer blow up once as it happens in Hollywood movies, and that was when a system was miswired during an oil rig revision. As soon as it booted up and the relais brought to A/D card online it emitted a loud bang and smoke, and its sturdy steel case went from rectangular to more ball shaped (which, in hindsight, must have saved us from injury because I suspect bits would have flown around otherwise, and we were 5 meters away from the thing when it happened, working on another server (our own, which had full optical insulators which rendered it immune to such mistakes). It turned out that electricians had miswired a junction box, so instead of getting the 30mA loop it was expecting, it was hooked up to raw 400V generator power, and the PC was *far* quicker than the fuse in expressing its dissatisfaction with that arrangement. There really was nothing usable left in the box, the surge had annihilated practically everything and cooked the motherboard and almost every PCB track on it.
It was only at that point that my boss finally stopped grousing about me adding those (costly) insulators to our design because they reduced our profit margin a bit..
Biting the hand that feeds IT
