- Joined
- May 1, 2002
- Location
- Salt Lick City, UT
fried capacitors resulting from overclock, watercooling, or crappy manufacturing?
I hadn't run my computer since mid December, when it was having some serious problems. I had wrongly assumed that the problems were related to file system corruption because I was too aggressive in searching out/destroying spyware.
Anyway, long story short-
I was hosting a LAN party last week, and I didn't have a chance to try reinstalling XP until 2 hours into the party. I couldn't get the disc to go. The same file kept refusing to copy. Switched CD-ROM drives, no dice. Switched IDE cables/channels, still nothing. Got a new, unused OEM disc, and same thing.
I throttled the computer back (XP 1600 running at 1596MHz) to stock voltage/FSU settings. The computer continued to falter on the XP installation when copying files to the freshly formatted partition. I gave up, pulled the video card, and used a spare motherboard/PSU that was lying around (no case- a naked motherboard/HDD/PSU on the desk!).
The next day, after waking up late and my head still ringing with "your watercooling setup is going to break and blow up that thing", I decided that although watercooling is definitely cool, I didn't care for the maintenance required with it, as well as the extreme custom'ness of it. The tubes didn't fit properly in my case, the case was duct taped together near the fan shroud....etc. Although it seemed to function properly, it looked like poop and I wanted a change. So I disassembled the water cooling system and started ripping the machine apart.
When I took the CPU block off, I found that I had four burst capacitors on the motherboard, directly underneath the CPU. They had hard brown goo sticking out the tops of them. I decided that it was without a doubt that the motherboard caused all the instability in the past two months.
Now my question-
Is it possible that my overclocking (1.8v CPU settings) caused the capacitors to fail? Is it possible that condensation (the system was never in a cold area so I'm not sure if this is possible) or a hairpin leak could have caused this? I've heard capacitors can explode when introduced to excessive moisture....is this true? Is it more likely that my motherboard (Soltek) was just using some bad quality capacitors and this would've happened without overclocking too?
Just thinking whether or not I should attempt to repair the board with new capacitors, or if I should cut my losses and move on..?
-ben
I hadn't run my computer since mid December, when it was having some serious problems. I had wrongly assumed that the problems were related to file system corruption because I was too aggressive in searching out/destroying spyware.
Anyway, long story short-
I was hosting a LAN party last week, and I didn't have a chance to try reinstalling XP until 2 hours into the party. I couldn't get the disc to go. The same file kept refusing to copy. Switched CD-ROM drives, no dice. Switched IDE cables/channels, still nothing. Got a new, unused OEM disc, and same thing.
I throttled the computer back (XP 1600 running at 1596MHz) to stock voltage/FSU settings. The computer continued to falter on the XP installation when copying files to the freshly formatted partition. I gave up, pulled the video card, and used a spare motherboard/PSU that was lying around (no case- a naked motherboard/HDD/PSU on the desk!).
The next day, after waking up late and my head still ringing with "your watercooling setup is going to break and blow up that thing", I decided that although watercooling is definitely cool, I didn't care for the maintenance required with it, as well as the extreme custom'ness of it. The tubes didn't fit properly in my case, the case was duct taped together near the fan shroud....etc. Although it seemed to function properly, it looked like poop and I wanted a change. So I disassembled the water cooling system and started ripping the machine apart.
When I took the CPU block off, I found that I had four burst capacitors on the motherboard, directly underneath the CPU. They had hard brown goo sticking out the tops of them. I decided that it was without a doubt that the motherboard caused all the instability in the past two months.
Now my question-
Is it possible that my overclocking (1.8v CPU settings) caused the capacitors to fail? Is it possible that condensation (the system was never in a cold area so I'm not sure if this is possible) or a hairpin leak could have caused this? I've heard capacitors can explode when introduced to excessive moisture....is this true? Is it more likely that my motherboard (Soltek) was just using some bad quality capacitors and this would've happened without overclocking too?
Just thinking whether or not I should attempt to repair the board with new capacitors, or if I should cut my losses and move on..?
-ben