Old Motherboard up in smoke...literally.

I was just sitting here with my old Athlon 800 system under my desk and I started to smell that signature smell of burned components, then a crackling sound. Then the system just powers off entirely. After opening up the case, I'm thinking "hmm, guess it's a blown PSU," so I dig through my closet and find another PSU.

Plug it into the mobo and power it on....no post...then suddenly...I look at the capacitors for the VRM on the mobo...smoking and spewing electrolyte!

I remember back when there was that capacitor scandal overseas, there was lots of computers coming into the shop I worked at with exploded caps. Never experienced it first hand till tonight. Funny thing too, the motherboard is a cheap old PC Chips Socket A everything integrated board that someone had given to me. It's probably got 7 years of use on it and it finally blew up. I was just thinking to myself the other night "if this cheap piece of crap has lasted this long, it must not have gotten the bad capacitors..." Whoops....spoke too soon. It really lasted a lot longer and worked much better than I had ever expected it to though being a cheap PC Chips integrated board.

I had a Asus Nforce2 MB do this a few months back.
I think the capacitor thing was even on alot of good boards to. As most buy that stuff bulk from a supplier but most with the bad caps lasted only up to a few years, mine lasted 2 , some lasted less then a month.
Funny how things like computers, lcds, plasma and so forth get better but the life expectancy seems to get worse. 7 years is pretty good on a PC though

guess its getting less because technology is advancing faster so they dont need to work 20 years before another upgrade(though my nes is still working after all these years)

Pyrotechnic said:

I was just sitting here with my old Athlon 800 system under my desk and I started to smell that signature smell of burned components, then a crackling sound. Then the system just powers off entirely. After opening up the case, I'm thinking "hmm, guess it's a blown PSU," so I dig through my closet and find another PSU.

Plug it into the mobo and power it on....no post...then suddenly...I look at the capacitors for the VRM on the mobo...smoking and spewing electrolyte!

Click to expand...

That's not a typical symptom of bad caps. You usually would have had symptoms months ago. The first symptoms probably would be crashing or erroring when running demanding stuff then it gets worse until it crashes often, even when idle then eventually fails to boot or boot properly, AFAIK.

The symptoms of bad caps usually aren't sudden like that!

Yeah the capacitors werent the only problem. There were also 2 MOSFET chips in the VRM area that looked pretty burnt. Maybe the capacitors caused these to burn up or the other way around ?

I did have an old Abit KT7 that had the bad capacitor issue. I got rid of the board before they blew up, but I played HELL trying to get my system to run right. I RMA'ed the board several times and Abit just gave me the run around each time, and back then...I had no idea about the capacitor scandal. It wasn't till years later and 20/20 hindsight that I realized what as going on.