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PCs Plagued by Bad Capacitors
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."
I've had a couple AMD boards go bad because of leaky capacitors.
Actually, I would go against this--something totally new and expensive will probably make use of better quality components. It is after they have been in the market for a while that they go cheap as they sell in mass and drive price down. Ever notice how old CD's lived forever, but new CD's scratch if you breath on them? I had one of the original 42 inch plasma screens, and it was built like a brick, I don't think I trust the new ones, they are lighter, thinner, and IMHO, built to be cheap, not last forever.
That's almost surely an urban legend. On the other hand, I heard that IBM had some similar problems with bad capacitors a few years ago. Affected a pretty large number of NetVista models, I think, though the absolute numbers of bad motherboards wasn't so bad... I don't know any of the details, but I have a fuzzy recollection that most of the bad capacitors were traced to a particular source in Taiwan.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I inherited a bunch of 3 GHz P4 Optiplex machines back in '03 after they were decommissioned from a student computer lab. The university buys cheaper machines as they only keep them around in the labs for a year or so normally.
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.
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
The capacitor issue is more widespread. The problem isn't that they are low quality, it's that a particular MFR was using a stolen and bad formula for fluid for a long while before they began to fail. These capacitors are in everything, cheap stuff, spendy stuff and everything in between. Badcaps.net explains in detail...
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.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
... with a rounded instead of a flat metal top
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 plenty of electrolytics in my day (midnight soldering sessions, reversed polarity, yada) About 9/10 times the vent hole blows first. Maybe 1/10 times the whole can blows off the base. Getting the can to deform this badly without either happening is pretty impressive.
I thought a Dragon Plus would have been one of their best, and maybe it was, but after months of swapping out stuff trying to figure out what was crashing my system, I finally pulled the motherboard out, and it looked like I had dried bloodstains on it. This was just over a year after I bought it.
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.
(And don't forget they are polarised. Putting them in backwards will make them explode)
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. ; )
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
i had one in a standard el-cheapo power supply. impressive bang, cloud of white smoke, box full of cap shreds.
people always think I'm dumb for going cheap (second hand, bottom-tier, whatever) on cars and computers and electronics
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 display, which at the time was being used to run a PSP promotional DVD which was displaying in only shades of purple on the cheapo flat screen TV it was hooked up to. I asked the lady if the TV or the DVD player was broken and she said they were fine, it was the promotional DVD which was done all in shades of purple (in my head I heard Dr. Evil say, riiiigh-T). I asked if they ever got returns on that model DVD player and she said she knew of none.
I should have realised, that she would not know. She is in sales, she is not at the huge returns desk near the front with the long line of less than happy customers with various "goods", hmmm okay "items" for return. I asked the nice young girl behind the counter about this model of DVD player which I was returning (because it would not recognise ANY DVD, not even the two I had just recently purchased with zero scratches) as to how many returns she had seen and she told me that she had seen lots of those units come back.
I also noticed this time what looked like the same PSP promotional DVD playing, except in full colour!
This is the third component DVD player I have had fail.
price hasn't equaled quality since your grandpa's day when everything was built out of painted steel and machined parts.
Reminds me of something I have been saying for a few years...
"You rarely get what you pay for, but you usually pay for what you get."
I recently spent $5,000 Aussie on a Sony notebook. Admittedly the display is spectacular and I expected the Sony to be a decent product. It mostly is, however it is a little flimsy. After only a few months of use the paint on the palm rests is wearing off. For one third to one quarter the cost of a decent small brand new Japanese car (did I say decent? Sorry, my expectations must be slowly sliding down in this new World), it would have been nice for this machine to at least have a metal top and bottom. I am fearful of moving it for the wear from flexing the chassis. My girlfriends Thinkpad has also broken all around the screen where the hinges are.
I like the look and feel of Powerbooks, but even they have issues, since their metal is just thin enough to cause permanent apparent warping in some cases, so I have heard.
I want quality and I am willing to pay for it! But I can't find it! It seems that I would need to, as you suggest with the industrial comment, purchase a hardened computer designed mostly for the US military if I want any decent level of sturdiness. But then I'd be paying 4-6 times the price of the consumer equivalent for a very heavy and strange looking machine. Fair enough, I expect that stuff to be super expensive due to the added hardness and limited economies of scale, but surely with the economies of scale which the consumer gear manufacturers can leverage, they could at least give us something acceptable.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Faulty components can really cause problems for manufacturers. Slashdot recently ran an article about digital cameras failing because of faulty Sony CCD sensors. The problem didn't just affect Sony cameras as several manufacturers used Sony's chips in their products.
But the demands on electronics are way higher now. The power density, temperatures and frequencies are much higher now (remember those 486s that ran only slightly warm with no heatsink?). You get more current being constantly pulled through the capacitors at a higher frequency (although that applies more to the switchmode side of things, rather than the linear regulators around the CPU), with hot air being blown around.
It's pretty normal in all fields for high performance to equal tighter tolerances and less room for error. It's more than just "the good ol days when things were made properly", although that is a factor too. There's a shitty cycle of consumers shopping for the lowest price and companies compromising products in order to compete. I've noticed that if you try to buy outside of that cycle you pay way more, instead of just the cost of better components and a slightly more complex design. This must be because a slightly more expensive product doesn't acheive a high enough sales volume. But these better products aren't enough better to account for the big price jump. And so the vicious cycle continues. Booooo.
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.
Back in 2002, I fixed a board this way. The cheapest caps from a reputable dealer cost me less than $10 and the board still works. I had little to lose and some time. It was worth the time and money. It cost much less than buying a new motherboard. It has run continuously and still serves as an email spam filter and back up computer.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.