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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."
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
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
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.
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. Well, considering electrolytic caps 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.
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.
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
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 -
you all deserve a kick in the joules.
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 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.
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.
I work for HP's customer support. If you tell the customers about internally known issues, you can get fired for it. The reason? The customers may go to the press and say that HP knows about a problem but isn't doing anything about it (like a recall of all units for instance). HP looks bad if you say you took "5 calls just like this one" today. HP looks good if you instantly order a repair on a seemingly unknown problem. The exception is for class issues, i.e. issues that are known to the public due to media exposure. It's part of the agent training to pretend we're oblivious to all problems, yet magically know how to solve them anyway.