PCstats discussion: Blown/faulty capacitors

[MikeD]

We've recently updated our article on blown and leaking motherboard capacitors. This was brought on by a couple of capacitor-related motherboard failures in the office over the last two months. If you've been following the PCstats newsletter, you'll know that Colin's work PC recently suffered this fate.

We're trying to get an idea of how common these types of capacitor-related failures are, so if you (or anyone you know) has lost a motherboard and/or other computer parts to capacitor failure, let us know here. Pictures would be great too.

[NotMyBest2Day]

i can get pictures in a day or two, but i lost a mobo because five capacitors popped. i don't know what happened to cause it, but i powered on and there was a muffled pop sound, and the fans came on, but nothing else happened. the five capacitors were with the on-board AC'97 audio..it was all audio capacitors. that was on a GA-7VTXE.

[Fetus]

I used to work for a small company that leased computers out to customers. We ordered most of our machines from a certain company that I won't name. After about 6 months to a year, we would get complains about these machines being really flaking, with lots of random reboots. After a lot of fighting and troubleshooting these boards, I talked to a guy who worked for this company in the tech support department, and he turned me the story he heard about. This is just word of mouth, so don't take it as fact.

Supposedly, there are two main companies that produce the electrolyte for capacitors. One of them had been developing a new chemical recipe for the electrolyte, when the other one stole a beta formula, and used it in a production line. These capacitors were then sold to various companies without the proper testing they required. After a few thousand hours of usage the caps bulge, and leak.

If you want more info on it, The Inquirer had a few articles on it over the last year:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=6085

[MACK]

Yes, The capacitor problem became known to me over 1 year ago (I think)...
and if you do a search on this I believe you will find a lot more info... here's one link
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/20...0207018535.htm

I thought I was lucky not to have the problem... until 8-2004
when 3 (yes 3) of my motherboads at my office failed.
They all failed within 1 week of each other... so I blamed a powerspike.
BUT, I had all 3 of the systems on Uninterruptible Power Supplies... 2 APC units, and 1 no name brand... all supplying over 600 VA in case of failure.

I did not realize at the time that it was a motherboard failure... so I ran various checks and what not... The hard drives seemed corrupted. And 1 hard drive (a maxtor) was completely unuseable...

But, even after using a new drive I still could not get the system to work.

Thats when I took a closer look at the motherboard. And I discovered the LARGE capacitors to be bulging and rusty at the tops where the 3 folds join together. It seemed only to affect ONE side in a row... of the same size caps.

The 3 motherboards were of 2 different brands... and I later had another brandname motherboard fail... ALSO with the capacitor problem.

When I discovered this, I sent off for an RMA... from the brandname and they ignored my request.

From what I have read... the motherboard mfg's are aware but ignoring the problem and will not recall the motherboards.

I suppose, I could try to resolder the proper caps back in... But, I do not know if the cap damage causes other electronic damage downstream after they fail... if they don't... then I would give it a try. nevertheless, I already had to replace the boards... and it would not be terribly useful to me to replace the new boards with older almost outdated boards.

MACK

[Assimilator87]

I had a FIC AN19C (KT400) motherboard that I replaced with an Abit because I kept getting graphics card failures. After I replaced the board, I noticed that I had 1 leaking capacitor and several bulging ones around the MOSFETs. The capacitors must have been very poorly made because the board was only in use for 1 or 2 years. I still have it in case I need it to test out other hardware.

[Ginji_1]

Hi all

I currently work for a college that has about 12 labs with 21 computers in each. Now capacitors going on M/B's is common here as these computers work all the time and never get cleaned and have been around for ages.

So not to my surprise, one day I go to fix a computer in one of the labs and find out that the board went...cool np change the board and presto computer works...then a day later another one goes and I start getting suspicious, so I opened one of the other computers and found that the capcitors have gone on that one as well, so I decided to check the entire lab...and what do u know the whole lab has gone..21 computers!.

Well I will have to do them one by one as to down an entire lab is not viable, but hey thats work{and here in Israel people get upset real quick - like new yorkers }.

Well I hope this shows you that this problem is common and I hope mabey M/B manufacturers will give stroner garuntees or make the prices a bit cheaper on sub standard borads.

Thanks for listening...
Ginji_1 form Israel.

[LupusNoctis]

Ah, the ever popular "failed capacitor" phenomenon. Glad to see I'm not the only one.

I work for a fairly large retail computer reseller, with the largest Computer Tech department in the region. We have had dozens of systems over the past year and a half with bulging, leaking capacitors.

The primary suspects have been early AthlonXP mainboards from ECS. primarily the K7S5A, and K7SEM model numbers. But we've had many other manufacturers as well (Abit, Gigabyte, many IBM Netvistas, MSI, and more I can't recall this exact moment). Some of the IBM boards we have replaced caps on successfully, but other boards are a wee bit tricky for shakey hand freestyle work (less caffine, I suppose).

No camera back here for picture taking, else I'd have a veritable library for you. Might still have some of the boards in the junk pile though. i'll have a look.

[TwistedLockUp]

Just opened up my case after reading the article, because I still have a KT7-RAID, bought back at the end of 2002. Unfortunately, I've noticed a couple of caps that show signs of leakage (one leaking from the top of the cap and one from bottom), plus a few others that are bulging on top; these are the green ones manufactured by JPCON. The black ones (JACKCON? - hard to read without taking out the mb) look fine though. It's still working, but has issues starting up sometimes. Now I'm considering buying some new caps and replacing them before the thing blows. :/

[mannu]

I have recently moved to Toronto and brought my old pc with me which i had used for 2 yrs outside Canada. I never had this cap. problems in other countries.

Here in Toronto, unfortunately you don't have switches on the wall pins and only thing i can do is pull the plug. These creates a spark everytime i pull my PC plug from the wall unit. And once i did this while my pc was ON!

Guess what!

Next time my pc won't start. Opened my unit and found all capacitors had blown.

Now, i got myself a surge suppressor and keeping my fingures crossed.

I'm not sure if my motherboard will start working if i changed all of these popped capacitors. If any of you had a success, please let me know.
(i have the image but don't know how to upload it).

[cordoba]

Are these bad caps existing on any new motherboards currently being stocked in the stores. I'm thinking of building a new machine but I don't want to pickup one of these bad boards.

[Assimilator87]

It's just something that happens, even to good motherboards sometimes. Just keep your choices within the major brands like Asus and Abit and you'll be fine for the most part. Even if the caps do blow, you'll probably have replaced the motherboard by then.

[Jerrym3]

I do all my own computer building and maint. This fall the one that I use for testing just stopped working. All fans would come on but nothing else. I took a quick look but it being a spare I mostly just checked the conections then put it in a corner. This week my son said he was having trouble with his daughter's, one that had been passed on from me to him to her. Reboot problems and lockups. He said she deletes things all the time so I figured that was the problem, missing os files. Formated but would not take os. Switched out everything, ram, video card, hard drive, and cpu. Nothing worked but it would boot to bios and dos. Had to be something with the motherboard. I never had one go bad before. Took it out into the sunshine to get a good look, (this is Florida) and saw the bulging and leaking caps. Went and got the other computer to take a look, same motherboard, same bulging and leaking caps. These are KT7-raid Abit boards. They were all JPcon caps. I read about this quite a while ago in some forums with these boards finally caught up. No problem just get new boards. Not so fast, they do not make motherboards that use sdram anymore. At least I could not find any. Oh well new boards and DDR ram. Easier then replacing caps.

[chrisdavi24]

I run a small computer store selling used & new systems. I have never ran into this problem until I got back this used system I sold about 6 months ago, the computer would turn on for about 4-5 sec then you would hear a short buz from the power supply then it turns off. Looking at the mb the caps looked like they were leaking from the tops, tried a new mb, same thing, anyway long story short, it turns out the cpu shorted out causing too much of a draw on the p/s, I have tried a few other mb's but it still does the same turn on - buzzz - turn off. Later I did some looking on the caps and found this place. The mb is a Epox EP-8KTA3L+, and what sucks about it is I have yet to find another mb that supports the ram this one had in it (PC133 512MB x 2)

[doctorg13]

About two years ago the local school district that I do work for began losing IBM Netvista mainboards. By summer (2003) an IBM tech was sent to help me replace all 13 boards even though only 5 had actually blown capacitors. I also lost a FIC mainboard shortly thereafter to a blown capacitor.

Two years ago a student who was assisting me turned on a computer in the elementary lab and heard a loud pop. This was the result of a capacitor actually exploding in the power supply.

Last fall one of my clients began experiencing random reboots on an XP machine. After many hours I finally began carefully inspecting the mainboard and found several bulging capacitors. Replacing the motherboard solved the problems.

[format19]

Hi peeps,

I am also glad to see that I am not the only one suffering

I have a customer who had 4x PC's and monitors all go within 10 days of each other.
All Acer Veriton PC's and Acer monitors. I popped the cases and found that the six capacitors allong side the CPU and the Ram slots were all bulged and leaking from the TOP.

I spoke with Acer technical support and they informed me that it was a known fault with the Veriton models, he told me to dismantle the Power supply and look for the BIG Blue capacitor next to the cables, sure enough it too was bulged and leaking.

He told me that they were out of warrenty and that the spare parts were not in stock and I would have to wait while they sourced the parts.

This was no good to my customer who was out of business without his PC's, I imaged the HD on to new PC's and got him back and running again. Prepared Insurance report and waited.
The insurance company had me ship the PC's to thier "Pre Approved Technical EXPERTS" and the letter I got back said that the capacitors had blown due to over heating over a period of time.

I can find no one that agrees with this, yes heat can make them swell but all four at the same time etc...

Any body got any comments as I have to prepair another letter to dispute for the insurance. [I am not in electronics I am in PC repair ]
Thanks

[toddvb]

Have had two ECS K7SEM (known junk) and three Gigabyte 7VKML boards go in the past year.

This is out of a pool of only 20 desktops, all with good PSUs and UPS's!

Various cap ratings (mostly GSC brand), as there were typically 10-12 blown by the time the systems failed. Usually 1000/1200/2200/3300 (all 6.3v).

One ECS and ONE Gigabyte board working well after I replaced all the blown caps (other 3 wouldn't POST, so there must have been further damage).

Seems to me that the least the MOBO Mfgs could do would be to refurb them at cost!

[tokin_bob]

Hi

I fix PC's for a living and a friend of mine recently had loads of capacitors pop on his motherboard, I do see this problem fairly frequently and as your article describes regarding intermittent faults; the first things to cheak are memory, HDD and overheating. My understanding is that capacitors regualte the voltage on a motherboard so if they pop you wont necessarilly get a specific error more likely just general instability.

I did also notice its only specific capacitors that go, not all of them but I have never investigated the part numbers for patterns or correlations in the failure.

I have found it to be a common problem but if the motherboard is out of warranty it's generally easier (sometimes cheaper) to replace it instead of resoldering capacitors.

The problem isn't specific. although an expensive PSU may provide less electrical spikes and more regular voltage (a common explanation to blown capacitors) I would like to know what specifically causes capacitors to blow.

Is it overheating, electronic spikes, power surges, overloaded motherboard, bad bios configuration or a combination of all of them.

I would say I see a capacitor problem on motherboards atleast once every two months, atthe end of 2004 (october time) I had a spate of three in one week, Not our PC's they were branded and I'm not sure I should mention names

My boss seems to think its caused by extreem voltage irregularities combined with heat.

any way hope that helps

[tokin_bob]

also check out http://www.badcaps.net/causes/ for more information,

[jydez]

In our campus computer store we deal mostly with Aopen boards, after that the most common we see is Asus. I don't recall seeing any Asus boards, but we've had a dozen or so Aopen boards (P3's, P4's, Athlon's) out of a few hundred that have gone. All but one were covered under warranty. I just had another one earlier this week. It's reached the point where if there are strange power-up issues I automatically check all the electrolytic caps for bulges or leaking electrolyte.

I figured there was an issue with power fluctuations that were fatiguing the caps or something. Then I noticed even the replacement boards that would come in showed evidence of having the caps replaced on them (faint stains at the bases of some of the replaced caps left over from when the electrolyte oozed out).

I have had 2 different Aopen boards in use for the last 3 years and had no issues with either of them, so I know it's not all boards that will experience the problem, and I now know it's not just Aopen that is having the problems. No doubt they've all already cut the faulty caps out of their production line.

I expect the manufacturers have all known about it for a while, but it's not large enough to warrant a mass recall (since not every board is experiencing it, in my experience maybe 3 or 4%). When this sort of thing happens with cars, they deal with it on a case-by-case basis, I would expect the same thing here.

If you run into a problem, especially if it is shortly after the end of the warranty, I would suggest an attempt to escalate the call, ask for a service manager, make a printout of whatever articles you can find detailing it, and refer to the "known issue" at hand, etc, and the good companies at least should take care of you.

My background is in electronics, so I'll replace the caps myself if they're out of warranty. It's relatively easy if you have any real experience with a soldering iron and have a steady hand, I've never found cap's to be expensive, maybe a dime or two each, as long as I can find the right spec's.

Disclaimer: I don't recommend it to anyone if you don't have the experience, because you can do more damage than you can fix. Wire one of them in backwards, for example, and it could blow and take out some of your other components as well. It's your responsibility and your call whatever you choose. I hate having to say that but I've had one too many people come back pointing fingers "You said..."

[Zefram]

I recommend anyone whos getting a motherboard to look for capacitor branded "rubycon"! It's japanese brand, guaranteed not to leak and major manufacturer such as Asus, MSi, Gigabyte, DFi, Abit.........
But if one or two of the capacitor blew off, make sure the electrolyte doesnt touch any of the mobo component.........
Seen one of my friend PC with leaked capacitor......... still working untill now (already 5 years!)
So, what i'm implying is having a leaked capacitor doesnt meant a broken PC. RMA it if you can, or use it until it totally screwed up!