[ale] Motherboard capacitors bursting

[Van Loggins]

>
> Message: 9 Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 19:04:27 -0400 From: Vincent Fox 
> <vf5 at plm.gatech.edu> Subject: [ale] Motherboard capacitors bursting 
> To: ale at ale.org Message-ID: 
> <20041006230427.GA5188 at gypsy.coon.gatech.edu> Content-Type: 
> text/plain; charset=us-ascii The Abit BX-133 board was famous for 
> this. They used cheap electrolytic capacitors and a marginal design. I 
> had probably six of these boards flake out on me. They don't usually 
> fail in a complete and obvious way they just start locking up or 
> rebooting occasionally when the 1st capacitor fails. As the load is 
> taken up by remaining capacitors in the string, they are under more 
> stress and then another one fails, and it becomes a bit less stable. 
> Continuing until 3 or 4 have blown at which point it becomes obvious 
> you have a hardware problem since it will no longer boot. Have a PC 
> that seems to be flaking out? Open it up and look for capacitors with 
> bulgy tops. No single manufacturer seems to be guilty of this. I have 
> had one electronics type tell me that electrolytic capacitors all have 
> a finite lifetime anyhow but they are far cheaper so everyone uses 
> them. So don't expect any board to last 100 years in operation just 
> some will last longer than others.
>
>> > Anyway, I seemed to remember someone on this list bemoaning poor quality
>>> > components in computers, and now I can testify to it.
>>    
>>

I've had two boards to fail on me like this.

The first one was a MSI K7T Master-S Socket A workstation/low end server board with built-in adaptec U160 SCSI.

Luckily It was still under warranty but I had to fight with MSI to get it replaced.

The second one was a Epox 8RDA+ Nforce 2 Socket A motherboard. It never gave me any indications that it was failing up until when It died. I had left my computer running and when I sat down in front of it the next day it had a blank screen like the system had went into power saving mode. Despite all of my attempts to wake the system up I couldn't so in desperation I hit the reset button. The system wouldn't post and the Post code indicator kept stopping on the check memory part of POST.

I figured it had a bad memory stick or a bad video card or Power Supply. all of those checked out ok when I tested them in other systems, however when I removed the video card I discovered a busted and oozing capacitor, and upon closer inspection the capacitors around the memory slots had started to bulge.

Unfortunately that board had been out of warranty for about 4 months, so I purchased a inexpensive Amptron Nforce2 motherboard from Computer Geeks http://www.compgeeks.com

If you're good with a soldering Iron and have access to junk motherboards you can replace the capacitors and make the board work again with a little work. I'm very bad with a Soldering Iron though so I haven't tried to fix my old Epox board yet.




-- 
Van Loggins        vloggins at turbocorp.com
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