PCs Plagued by Bad Capacitors 335
Hawaiian Rules writes "CNET has a story
detailing a new threat to Dell PCs, Apple iMacs and other computers with Intel boards. This has been documented on BadCaps.net for some time, but the article also discusses what to do if you suspect you've got a case of the bad caps."
More than just Intel boards (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:2, Interesting)
On our systems with UPS's this seems to happen less often, my guess is the cleaner power puts less stress on the board.
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:3, Funny)
If you think that capacitors can't explode and leave a dent then you have obviously never stuck one in a 240V mains socket and turned it on. (This works best with lab bench sockets, where you can flip the switch from *behind* it.)
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:4, Funny)
More fun than blowing them up is to charge them and toss them at someone while saying 'catch'. Even more fun is getting a coke can sized one and welding things together with it (you can only get a little spot welded, though - perfect for carraige bolt stick men).
Or better yet, wire one to the inside of a door handle and charge it up. Man, I never thought my grandma could jump so high....
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:4, Informative)
Or better yet, wire one to the inside of a door handle and charge it up. Man, I never thought my grandma could jump so high....
If this can be lethal, please mod this post up informative.
If this is post is modded up, be careful! Doing the quoted things can kill people.
Safety first!
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:3, Informative)
That's correct. Never, never play with charged capacitors. Except for the carraige bolt stick man and popping big ones, I was just kidding.
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:2, Interesting)
That's nothing. I work at a university where we purchased hundreds of the Dell GX270 a couple years ago. In the last year we've had almost all of the fail on us (we are expecting all to fail in time). The worst part is that we've had to wait up to 4 weeks to get warranty service when we paid for NBD service. The hold up we were told was due to backorder.
The warranty service tech tells us the problem is with the faulty capacitors. Gotta
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:2)
Our service has been great, I just didn't like that until now Dell would not admit there was a problem! When you see the same problem on a second board, you start to think there might be an issue. Then the tech tells you they have been having problems on these boards....but when you phone dell, and say you have had another board go down with leaky caps, they pretend like they have no idea what you are talking about
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:2, Informative)
Well look at that. We're not alone in the world after all.
My workplace also purchased a whole bunch of GX270's a while back, and we too are having them fail on us at an impressive rate. It's interesting because I always thought that Foxconn motherboards (what Dell uses) were pretty reliable and well made.
The crappy part is that we have all these systems under same-day warranty, but because they are backlogged with so m
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:2)
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:3, Interesting)
My in-laws' Netvista fell over last week, lots of magic blue smoke and 3 stuffed capacitors. The twin of that machine blew up 4 months earlier.
The air flow & knock sensors in my car went - $1450 repair bill. Is there going to be a class action? If so, that was the capacitors.
Gotta go... my washing machine is making funny noises.
Problem's been around for awhile. (Score:5, Informative)
Problem Documented and Instructions (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.vonwentzel.net/ABS/Repair/ [vonwentzel.net]
There are also instructions buying and replacing the failed parts, with good images. I followed these instructions a couple years ago very successfully.
Re:Problem's been around for awhile. (Score:2)
Our supplier (which is staffed by a couple of people that I am now rather good friends with) got a laugh out of the story too. It was the first bad cap we'd had out of a couple hundred machines we ordered from them so it was just one of those things.
Still not as bad as the machine that literally caught fire one February morning a year
Re:Problem's been around for awhile. (Score:5, Funny)
I THOUGHT COMPUTERS WITH BAD CAPS WAS A PROBLEM SINCE THEY INVENTED CHAT. That has to have been well before 2002.
Re:Problem's been around for awhile. (Score:3, Interesting)
Fa
Problem's been around for awhile - since the 1980s (Score:3, Informative)
If you don't wanna get ripped off. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the same for everything technological! Only through trial and error, consumer brute force sort of do they get the best product after 1-2 years for most products such as Dell's, i'd cite motor companies too but bah.
Re:If you don't wanna get ripped off. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the same for everything technological! Only through trial and error, consumer brute force sort of do they get the best product after 1-2 years for most products such as Dell's, i'd cite motor companies too but bah. Well, considering electrolytic caps [cwru.edu] were invented in the 30s, I'd think we've given them enough spin-up to get that newfangled technology under control. The problem here is just poor quality control and cost-cutting. Luckily in the free-market, this type of things tend be a short-lived trend... it just requires the spotlight.
Re:If you don't wanna get ripped off. (Score:3, Insightful)
Back in the early 80s, I worked for a defense contractor. One of the units we made used a FET (Field effect transistor) - a nice standard 2n number if I remember right. Well, one day, about every 3 or 4th unit we made failed ONE test, and all symptoms pointed at the FET - you'd change it, and sometimes it would go away - luckily, we saved the "BAD" FETs - it seems that ONE of the manufacturers had "Improved" their
Re:If you don't wanna get ripped off. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:If you don't wanna get ripped off. (Score:2)
Re:If you don't wanna get ripped off. (Score:2)
Re:If you don't wanna get ripped off. (Score:5, Interesting)
On the theme of new and expensive, I'm a little suprised that motherboard MFR's that make high end boards for enthusiasts (you know the ones, with ugly flourecent plastic bits and silver paint and whatnot) haven't used any SMC caps for these boards. You only see them on prototypes. I'd think if there was a market for a motherboard with yellow PCI slots and a purple PCB that this would be a much more attractive option.
On the other hand, I suppose it costs nothing to make lime green and orange connectors, but actually making something nice would cost a few dollars.
Re:If you don't wanna get ripped off. (Score:3, Informative)
I'm surprised that you're surprised. SM capacitors are usually much smaller values used for decoupling the supply pins of individual chips (ceramics typically 0.1-0.47uF), or low values for minor ripple filtering (tantalums up to 10-22uF). The electrolytics (
Re:If you don't wanna get ripped off. (Score:3, Insightful)
It gets even more ridiculous than that. Remember that AOpen motherboard with the vacume tube amplified built-in sound card? Yeah, that's what I need! Bugger the high quality core components! I need extra harmonics! Warm sound!
This all comes down to marketting. Most people don't know what they need or should wan't, so what they want is dictated to them by the companies who
Re:mod parent up (Score:3, Interesting)
I love trawling through ebay for certain older Sun's, DEC's, etc.
Whenever I buy something here is Australia from a department store, especially from one like Big-W, Target or K-Mart, I am left thinking on the way home, "is it going to work when I get it out of the box? If it does, for how long?"
I bought a DVD player just recently from Big-W. I think it was rebadged to AWA. The model was on
Nothing to do with brand new high-tech (Score:5, Informative)
That's why this is such a surprise.
I know it's bad form to bitch about moderation, but I can't see any way that the parent is insightful. Nichicon has produced good caps for years. Manufacturers pay a premium for Nichicon caps. Something or someone fucked up a Nichicon. Has nothing to do with trial and error.
Re:If you don't wanna get ripped off. (Score:2)
A cap is basically a chemical rechargeable battery made for quick charging and discharging. The best you can hope for is the use of high quality chemicals. You have to understand however the people who make them make millions of them and its very difficult to maintain a low impurity count in the chemicals while still making a profit.
There is a reason why most electronics have a 90 w
Not the first time (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot - Taiwanese Capacitors Leaking, Exploding [slashdot.org]
Watch out for all the 'Geeks popping a cap in your mother' jokes.
-Eric
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry I couldn't resist
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
Few people have that capacity.
Re:Not the first time (Score:3, Funny)
I don't get it.
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
Ohmy God; can we please get back to the current topic? And try to conduct yourselves with a little more dignity.
Re:Not the first time (Score:4, Funny)
Ohm my god. As farads I'm concerned... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ohm my god. As farads I'm concerned... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
Few people have that capacity.
The story just induces bad jokes, doesn't it?
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
Few people have that capacity.
The story just induces bad jokes, doesn't it?
This thread shows there is little impedance to such humor on
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
Few people have that capacity.
Well, it doesn't require that much inductive reasoning.
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
I don't get these modern jokes... I just can't stay current.
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
Not even Faraday?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farad [wikipedia.org]
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not the first time (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not the first time (Score:3, Funny)
Jokes. (Score:2)
Re:Not the first time (Score:2)
Re:Not the first time (Score:3, Funny)
If your resistence to these jokes is R, then the power you require to keep them at a current I is given by P = I^2 R
Why the heck can't we use the <sup> tag anyway?
Me too - mine was a Soyo SY-K7V DRAGON Plus (Score:3, Interesting)
What needs to be remembered is that often a system with bad caps can damage other components, from memory to the CPU to hard drives, even cards attached to the PCI bus. This was devastating when it happened to me.
What to do if you have a Bad Cap: (Score:3, Funny)
Nothin new here. Just like Car Makers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nothin new here. Just like Car Makers. (Score:2)
I don't know about that. I've been into this hobby for a long time and it seems as though quality in all forms of electronics has taken a major dive since the late 90s. I certainly don't remember any of my XT and AT boards ever having bad caps, but I've had my fair share with ATX.
Re:Nothin new here. Just like Car Makers. (Score:2)
Ford put plastic water pump impellers in Duratech engines found in Contours, Escapes, and others... a few cents off the cost, and they're MTBF is 40k miles - perfect. Just long enough to get out of warranty, but not long enough to not make money on the repair.
Now look, Dell's paying for it out the arse this quarter because they had to go fix all their Optiplex. Good - they should have paid attention and bought the three cent caps, not the two cent deals.
Re:Nothin new here. Just like Car Makers. (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that Nichicon screwed up somehow, not that Intel got burned for buying the cheapest parts.
Happened to me.. (Score:3, Informative)
You can read the whole history of dying iMacs on Macintouch [macintouch.com].
Re:Happened to me.. (Score:2)
Re:Happened to me.. (Score:2)
Not just motherboards... (Score:2)
So? (Score:2)
Modern Times (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Modern Times (Score:3, Interesting)
After I knew what they looked like (Score:4, Insightful)
My least favourite kind of capacitor though, is one that works properly, but has been put in the worst place possible so that putting the heat sink on that is supposed to match the CPU, is impossible. And you can't exactly bend those suckers over out of the way, so you have to buy another heat sink that conforms to the annoying motherboard layout.
Re:After I knew what they looked like (Score:3, Interesting)
These are easily tested using the patented Bugs Bunny artillery shell quality control inspection procedure: Tap sharply with a hammer and if you are still alive, write "dud"..er.."good" on the side with a sharpie.
Seriously, this sounds like a double foulup by Nichicon. Overfill with electrolyte so there is insufficient airspace for thermal expansion, then screw up the emergency vent hole at the bottom so the thing has no choice but to burst. I've blown pl
it's not that hard to fix (Score:4, Informative)
Read the values of the leaky caps, get replacements, or near enough in value replacements. This will probably cost about $5.
Desolder the old caps, use a stainless steel pin to clean the solder out of the hole (since solder won't take easily to stainless), pop the new cap in (with the correct polarity), and solder it.
I had an asus board go like this a couple of years ago, it took me about 1/2 hour to fix the issue, but most of that was getting the board out of the case, and reinstalling it.
I called up asus, and had a runaround, before I identified the caps as the issue, and decided to fix it myself.
I doubt it's going to cost $300 million dollars to fix this. I'm typing this on a GX270, and it's had the motherboard replaced in it already, but I don't know if caps were the reason for that.
It's my work machine, first the hard drive died, so I called Dell and got it replaced, then the mobo died, and I just called Dell and got it fixed, I didn't investigate the issue myself, like I would have done if I owned the equipment, or if it was out of warranty.
Anyway, while it might cost them a bit in labour, the hardware's not going to be all that much, replace the first few boards with working ones, then refurb the retrieved boards, and use those to replace the dodgy board, rinse, repeat.
Re:it's not that hard to fix (Score:5, Informative)
Sure its easy enough to go to the local electronics store, and buy an equivilent cap (ie match the Voltage and Capacitance written on the cap), but there are a couple of other very important (depending on the application) normally not marked parameters.
Ripple Rating, Temperature, and ESR
ESR = Effective Series Resistance and can cause stability problems if it is too high.
If the Ripple Current Rating is too low, you could end up with more exploding / dying caps due to over heating.
If you do decide to DIY, I suggest you buy 105oC, low ESR caps. (And don't forget they are polarised. Putting them in backwards will make them explode)
Re:it's not that hard to fix (Score:2)
I've had this issue on IBM and VIA mother boards. It seems to affect all makes of machines.
Re:it's not that hard to fix (Score:3, Interesting)
The best looking cap explosion I ever saw, was a tantalum which I accidentally soldered in the wrong way, while building a digital frequency meter.
Once it came time to test... a small bit of the top popped off and a silver molten stream of what looked like beads of mercury came gushing out and off that stream came lots of smoke. It looked so cool I half did not want to switch it off. ; )
knowledge is not a judgement substitute (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of knowledge never makes up for bad judgement. It's broke, what you do won't make things worse. This is a case of little to lose and something to gain.
The board is dead or flaky because it has cheap caps. Do you think putting new cheap caps will be worse? The worst you can do is screw up the traces with a cheap soldering iron. Then your dead board remains dead and you move on.
Re:it's not that hard to fix (Score:3, Informative)
It's amazing how little work is required to do this once your on a roll, and does wonders for ones soldering skills.
While I've found nothing is better than using brand new caps, I've found boards that die from other causes (eg, idiot techs with slipping screwdrivers) are a good source of the right size salvageable cap
One would assume this would be fixed by now! (Score:2)
I guess the lawsuits never came. Maybe it would be one time sleazy lawyers could do some good? It is pretty sad that electronics from ten years ago are better quality than todays and they know exactly why and yet it isn't fixed...
CAPS BAD? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Not a new problem at all.. (Score:2)
Not new at all - quite a few Rev. A iMac G5s had this problem. I bought this 17" in November, and the bad caps finally failed in March. Apple sent me a new midplane and I swapped it out myself, but from what I hear they're now requiring people to take their machines to an authorized Apple service provider to get the work done.
I took pictures of the midplane/motherboard replacement process [flickr.com], clearly showing the bad/bulging caps on the original system board.
I encountered this about 6 years ago (Score:2)
LK
bad caps (Score:5, Funny)
yeah, this one time in college, there was this girl... it was my first time, not hers though... i didn't know...
oh! caps! never mind...
You blew it (Score:2)
This has been a real hassle for me. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I roped them together into a really nice Beowulf cluster for running my simulations and for the past 2 years I've had nodes die left and right. I'm sure the machines are out of warranty now, but I really hope Dell fixes these machines. I seem to remember Gateway doing this back in 2002. Now that the official word is out, maybe the computer department will take my word for it. What does a silly physicist know about computers and motherboards anyway?
Mike.
Re:This has been a real hassle for me. (Score:2)
Christ, I work for a major telecom company where they make software developers use 900 MHz PIII laptops.
Re:This has been a real hassle for me. (Score:2)
Yeah, crazy isn't it? I couldn't believe it when I heard it. They update the hardware at the beginning of each fall semester in the student labs. Nice new flat screens, etc. Whatever the fastest-latest-greatest is that Dell offers. Then they distribute the "old" machines to faculty members, GAs, etc. I was lucky to get an entire lab's worth. I just wonder what kind of money th
Stamped with an "X" on top ? (Score:5, Informative)
Not that it always works - plenty of caps still just "pop" violently and spew their content across the electronics anyway.
So don't look for a stamped "X", chances are all your caps have them
Re:Stamped with an "X" on top ? (Score:2)
You mean like all those pits mysteriously appear on your windshield?
http://www.washington.historylink.org/output.cfm?
Re:Stamped with an "X" on top ? (Score:2)
Re:Stamped with an "X" on top ? (Score:2)
"Bad Clap" (Score:2)
Anyone else misread this as "what to do if you suspect you've got a case of the bad clap [sexinfo101.com]"?
Sheesh, I've got to start reading the headline first (although on /. that doesn't always clarify things either).
The real story is in IEEE Spectrum, April 2003 (Score:5, Informative)
The definitive study, from The Computer Aided Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) Electronic Products and Systems Center [umd.edu], is "Identification of Missing or Insufficient Electrolyte Constituents in Failed Aluminum Electrolytic Capacitors" [dfrsolutions.com]. CALCE actually took capacitors apart and analyzed the electrolyte.
To see if the excessive hydrogen was being produced by impurities in the capacitor foil, wavelength dispersive x-ray spectrographic (WDS) analyses of foils from a capacitor from the lot of Taiwanese capacitors known to bulge and foils from a capacitor from a lot of non-bulging Japanese capacitors were performed.
A small amount of magnesium was detected in both the Taiwanese and Japanese foils, and copper was detected in the Taiwanese foils alone (see Table 1). Ignoring the topical constituents of oxygen and carbon, the purity of the cathodic aluminum foil from the Japanese capacitor worked out to be approximately 99.1 wt%, which was within the limit set by Dapo. The purity of the cathodic aluminum foil from the Taiwanese capacitor was approximately 97.5%,which was below the minimum value stated by Dapo. The insufficient purity of the Taiwanese aluminum foil could cause gaseous hydrogen production that would not be impeded by a depolarizer, but the galvanic couples were not thought to be sufficient to account for the rapid production of hydrogen gas that was necessary to cause the relatively rapid bulging of the capacitor cans. There were other anomalies in the ion chromatographic analyses,chiefly variations in the amounts of ammonium and phosphate ions present. Ammonium ions in water form ammonium hydroxide, which is strongly basic. This raised concerns about the pH of the electrolyte in the bulging capacitors,as a review of the chemical properties of aluminum oxide - the dielectric - showed that it is slightly soluble in basic solutions (but not in acidic)[8 ]. Measuring the pH of electrolytes from capacitors from the Taiwanese lot known to bulge and from a Japanese lot that had not exhibited bulging showed that the electrolytes of the bulging lot were weakly basic (7 < pH < 8),while those of the non-bulging lot were acidic (pH 4).
And that's the cause - internal corrosion because the electrolyte has a highly acidic Ph.
Re:The real story is in IEEE Spectrum, April 2003 (Score:2, Informative)
GSC brand (Score:2)
It's now gotten to the point where I have to specify motherboards and graphics cards without GSC capacitors. Every single Gigabyte GA-7VRXP we've had has had bad caps develop over two years - three happened in the space of two weeks, just after the warranty expired of course!
Windows gets blamed for this (Score:2)
Anybody who's been a hardware tech and built machines for any significant length of times, has known about issues like these for years. And the funny thing is, a lot of people wind up blaming Windows on problems that were really being caused by faulty hardware. In the early days of win 95, I noticed a lot of times that Windows was really unstable due to low end and sometimes bad hardware. Granted, windows
Bad caps turned the iMac G5 into a lemon (Score:3, Informative)
1. Replaced the motherboard in two of these machines.
2. Replaced burned power supplies in one of these.
3. A third machine burned both the motherboard and the power supply. It has taken Apple over a week to ship the parts to be replaced.
Al repairs so far have been under warranty. Half the service transactions have been done thru the genius desk, half thru Apple Care. Both methods are painfully slow.
Also, on the iMac G5 Apple will extend coverage specifically for the capacitor issue, so even if your warranty coverage expires they will fix your machine at their expense (http://www.apple.com/support/imac/repairextensio
There goes the magic smoke (Score:2)
A few weeks later, I was unable to connect to the machine from home, so I went do
This is business as usual. (Score:2)
That's right, business as usual. It's not just motherboards, it's nearly every type of componant. I've seen motherboards, power supplies, and monitors blow capacitors, too.
You have to remember, (A) by the time the caps have blown, the products are usually well out of warranty, and (B) the percentage of customers who will ever know that you used cheap capacitors is next to nil. That doesn't give you much of an incentive not to use the cheap ones, does it?
steve
People still forget... (Score:2, Informative)
Don't
nothing new move along.... (Score:2)
they go bad in TVs, Computers, even your clock radio.
thing is, we demand bigger and better and the power requirements are getting higher and higher.
Processors are getting faster and faster and that demands absolutely clean power.
I had 2 motherboards fail 2 days ago (how ironic)
Recapped with low ESR, hitemp caps and im good to go for at least another couple years.
Some of these caps are cheap, dont get me wrong.
Expecially on motherboards. but motherbo
i had one (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't replace caps unless: (Score:4, Informative)
(Best bet is to order them from Digi-Key, they list the full specs.)
You also need a big honkin' soldering iron as each of those capacitor leads are soldered to many layers of copper foil, which make excellent heat sinks. It takes 50 to 100 watts of heat to heat up all those layers in an expeditious fashion.
I would first practice this art on an old scrapped motherboard. A true geek always has a few of these around. Practice your unsoldering technique until you can get a capacitor off (no jokes pls) in 20 seconds with no damage to the board.
Don't ask me how I learned all the things not to do.
Anybody want to buy a few "as-is" mobos?
Re:Pick The Bad Cap And Be A Winner! (Score:2)
I think you mean... (Score:3, Funny)
Unless you call that a cap. In that case, more power to ya.