Slashdot Mirror
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.
Bad Caps have been a problem since 2002 at least. For awhile, I was making some bucks repairing Apple Airports, with all their bad caps.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Never buy brand new high-tech toys before they've actually passed major consumer testing.
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.
Coding projects blog - Code Slim
I had this happen to an old Asus board I had a couple year ago. It was covered on /. before.
Slashdot - Taiwanese Capacitors Leaking, Exploding
Watch out for all the 'Geeks popping a cap in your mother' jokes.
-Eric
Call Capman
If a car maker can get away with a cheaper, flimsier [insert part here], save a few cents on each car, and sell millions of cars, they can make a mo'load more profit than if they'd gone with the slightly better quality part on every car. Same thing here only with mobos and capacitors -- nothing new.
This sig rocks the casbah.
You can read the whole history of dying iMacs on Macintouch.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I had this happen on an Asus motherboard I got in 2001, noticed it when I was swapping out RAM in 2003. Board still works to this day, but you can see a line going from one of the regulator caps down to the PCI slots. I wrote down what kind of cap it was in case I was bored and wanted to replace it.. but honestly, after almost 5 years with this T-Bird board, it's not a big worry of mine. Still running, still over clocked, still a heck of a Linux system.
-=JML=-
The Internet really has become quite a zoo. Once the chairman of IBM thought "there is a world market for maybe five computers". Now there's a server farm just for bitching about bad capacitors. We really live in an age of miracles.
--
make install -not war
It was easy to spot obviously bad capacitors once I knew what they looked like. The ones I notice look like little cylinders on metal legs, with a rounded instead of flat metal top.
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.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Ok, I realise most people (in general, not the /. population) probably wouldn't know which end of a soldering iron to hold, but it's not that hard to fix the issue..
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.
ME NO UNDERSTAND!
if you suspect you've got a case of the bad caps
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...
--iggy_mon - www.ananonymouskiller.com - Die Trying -
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.
you all deserve a kick in the joules.
The problem with the Airport base station capacitor failures is described on this web page:
http://www.vonwentzel.net/ABS/Repair/
There are also instructions buying and replacing the failed parts, with good images. I followed these instructions a couple years ago very successfully.
The article says that the caps have "... a letter "X" stamped on the top." They are not stamped with the letter "X" - they are stamped to allow the caps to deform and vent the boiling liquid contents in a predictable manner when it fails. That is why the top of a failing cap bulges and not the sides.
..
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
The caps were made by Nichicon. Nichicon has been in business for 50 years and has had, up to now, the reputation of building *the best* low esr high quality electrolytic caps on the market. I've specified Nichicon caps only in designs because they work better than anything else.
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.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
But that's not what happened. The capacitor company in question, Nichicon is, or rather was, the best in the business. Manufacturers pay a premium for Nichicon caps because they were the best available. The motherboards in question were made by Intel and Intel uses quality parts.
The problem is that Nichicon screwed up somehow, not that Intel got burned for buying the cheapest parts.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
The definitive study, from The Computer Aided Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) Electronic Products and Systems Center , is "Identification of Missing or Insufficient Electrolyte Constituents in Failed Aluminum Electrolytic Capacitors". 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.
We bought six identical iMac G5s, plus two of us bought identical systems for our homes. Out of the batch of 8 machines, we have:
n program/).
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
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
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.
a bad rubber.
Unless you call that a cap. In that case, more power to ya.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
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?
- You're really sure you have bad capacitors.
- You have successfully removed capacitors from a board before.
- You have the right tools:
- A fine-point soldering iron, 47 to 150 watts. NOT your typical 20-watt pencil iron.
- A solder-sucker.
- Known good capacitors:
- Not from Rat-Shack.
- Not salvaged from a dead car stereo
- Same uF.
- Save Volts
- Rated for HIGH RIPPLE CURRENT.
- Rated for 85 or 105 degrees C.
- A grounding strap for your body and soldering iron.
- Willing to take the 25% risk of killing the mobo anyway.
The reason for all these cautions is that mobo power supply capacitors are highly stressed-- those square black FETs are hitting the caps with 30-amp pulses about 200,000 times a second! Your basic Radio-Shack 49 cent capacitor can't handle this kind of stress.(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?
Nichicon appears to be the only company manufacturing those short (~5mm high) axial capacitors, and our repair facility had to order them directly from Japan, as I wanted the 105 degree C rated caps, in contrast to the 55C rated caps that were installed in the radios. In South Florida, you could easily get in-dash temperatures over 200F: 90F air temperature outside the car, sunny day cooking the inside of the car.
Watt are you talking about?
Shades of Grayden
It's not claiming that capacitors maintain current. They help deal with current (ie - voltage) surges. Capacitors store charge, and current is the movement of charge. The capacitor provides a place for this charge to be temporarily absorbed relative to ground, lessening the immediate impact on voltage at that node. This is why capacitors are used to smooth out supply rails.
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.