Motherboard and PSU quality going downhill? Well, read this!

A few days ago I was in King Soopers and was looking through some magazines when I came across a very interesting article about capacitors and what it means for today's motherboards and power supplies.

Anyway, I heard about something with the capacitors and they goofed up some part about the electrolyte and millions of defective capacitors have been sold around the world, buyers include those such as motherboard and power supply manufactures.

I have recently noticed a negative trend in PSU, motherboard, and video card quality from reading posts in these forums for about a year now. I am seeing more and more video cards blowing in 2. Well.....I saw that once. But I have heard many times of motherboard caps exploding, leaking, and swelling. Same with PSU's.

So anyways, I just thought that was pretty interesting, and that definitely answered my question of why reliability has gone downhill. Maybe it will be interesting info for some of you guys.

Anyways, the lesson to be learned here, is always glance at your caps. Especially if the computer starts acting funny, stability, icky smells coming from it, voltage rails fluctuating, check your caps. They should be standing straight up, be perfectly cylindrical, have no leaking fluids coming out, not be discolored or discolor the motherboard/PSU/video card/whatever PCB is right below them, and the tops should be perfectly flat, and the K on top of them not opened up.

Just as a safety reminder, if something blows up in your comp and you investigate, remember to wear safety glasses or something, because if it blew up before, it could still blow up even with it off and unplugged. And don't touch anything inside the PSU.

Cheers!
-0cer

God, people responsible for stuff like that are probably in for it if this is true. It's kinda weird to think that the people you buy your mobo from buy their parts from another guy who made his parts wrong. Seems like there's a lot of hands that touch your motherboard, so lots to go wrong.

Oh yeah, and capacitors are filled with ACID, so watch yourself!

I know abit bought a ton of bad caps back in their p3 board days. all it takes is once bad production run to ruin a company. I think they should have recalled the boards or offered to fix them.

Bad caps are still having an effect, although at this point, I wouldn't expect anyone to still be making components with them......

Overclockers were probably among the first to notice the issues as we tend to work things just a little bit harder than most.
But bad caps will eventually go anyway- motherboards from a few years ago that are in mild, occasional use may still have the original bad caps.....
But the old story of the factory (in Taiwan I think) that made all the bad caps should NOT be having an effect on newer stuff.

Newer stuff having problems is more likely to be caused by increasing heat and power requirements, IMO, or just plain under-engineered components.

The suggestion to check them periodically and use caution when messing with them is good advice!

Very interesting read

rogerdugans said:

Newer stuff having problems is more likely to be caused by increasing heat and power requirements, IMO, or just plain under-engineered components.

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Exactly, when we overclock, we are pushing our boards to the limit of stability. Thus increasing the strain on the overall board, and will make those bad caps go Uh-oh! Skeddy-Os!

Ebola said:

I know abit bought a ton of bad caps back in their p3 board days. all it takes is once bad production run to ruin a company. I think they should have recalled the boards or offered to fix them.

Click to expand...

Yeah, around mid-2002 the KX7/KR7A and TH7 families were notorious for having leaky caps. When the nforce2 came along I went with Epox because of that among a few other things.

Ebola said:

I know abit bought a ton of bad caps back in their p3 board days. all it takes is once bad production run to ruin a company. I think they should have recalled the boards or offered to fix them.

Click to expand...

It wasn't only Abit.
There are quite a few other manuf. that used bad caps, Abit is probably the only one that admitted to have used bad caps.

While they didn't recall the boards, they did repair the boards for free. I'm pretty sure they'll still repair old boards (2+ years) for free if it has to do with bad caps.

I know some people got caps for free (just had to pay shipping) to repair their own board.

A few other brands that used bad caps are, Soyo, Epox, MSI, A-Open....and the list goes on.

mmm...free caps. i wonder if i could get black caps to replace my silvers?

Nice input guys, but from the article I read, they said something recent and new boards that are starting to show up are having problems. I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure that is what I read.

Anyway, I checked all of my caps and all are good. PSU too

If you want to take preventative measures, there are some capacitors rated for 2x - 3x the usual lifespan, 5,000+ hours operation @ 105C, such as the Panasonic FM series.

^^^^ talk about possibility of seriously modding your mobo and vid card - dont just replace the thermale paste - heatsinks - replace the caps!!!

i think someplaces have tried this no? i beleive tom modified some Asus board for one of their nitro cooling tests...