vanDongen/Gilcher wrote: > If there are little brown spots on the top of some condensers on the mobo, > then they are fried and you have to get a new one.(unless you fancy soldering > multi-layer boards) Apperently some factories saved a few tenths of pennies > by using substandard parts.
Steve Harris wrote: > ... but If the motherboard is oldish (couple of years or so) then its > worth eyeballing the motherboard for bulging capacitors, I lost my studio > PC to this and we lost a load at work. > > The tops should be slightly concave and clean, if theres any sign of brown > gunge (technical term) or bulging then the motherboard is a gonner. > > There was a bad batch of capacitors for a while from a major manufacturer, > but I suspect all the bad boards have blown allready by now. There was a bad batch of capacitors doing the rounds a few years back. I've seen a large number of MSI K7T Turbo boards die this way as well as two HP boards from the same era - around the time of the Athlon-900. It wouldn't surprise me if Dave's mainboard is suffering from these bad capacitors since the symptoms are very close to those I've seen in the 20 or so failures I've witnessed: the machine gets less and less stable until finally either it doesn't boot (mostly) or the offending capacitor(s) explode (as has happened twice in my experience). I've been told from a reputable source that it wasn't actually the mobo factories which did the dirty as such. An electrolyte formula was apparently stolen from a factory, copied at another and then stolen *again* and passed to a third. It was the resulting capacitors from the third factory which, falsely branded as a reputable brand, found their way into all these mainboards which have been dying over the past 3 or so years. I started seeing mainboards failing in machines which run 24/7 about 3 years ago. Since then, mainboards with intermittant use have been showing up with the same fault. The last one I saw suffering this problem surfaced only a few months ago, so there are still some out there. From my observations it appears related to power-on hours which, given the failure mode of the capacitors, isn't all that surprising. Of course this is all cold comfort for those unfortunate enough to be stuck with a faulty board. Regards jonathan