Slashdot Mirror
Solid Capacitor Motherboards Introduced
jckrbbt writes with news that Gigabyte has introduced solid capacitor motherboards in its Intel 945 chipset products. From the article: "[S]olid capacitors have a higher tolerance for higher temperatures and they also perform better with higher frequencies and higher current than electrolytic capacitors. The superior heat resistance and better electric conductivity will allow PC enthusiasts to tweak the highest levels of performance from their system without fear of excessive capacitor wear or exploding capacitors."
The three year average doesn't surprise me, Dell has had a multitude of problems with bad/bulging caps
I'm not fat, just big boned...
Iwill has been using them for over one year. Just check out the DK8EW or DK8ES boards. Looks more like free advertising for Gigabyte...
Solid capacitors also last longer with an average lifetime of 23 years compared to only three for electrolytic capacitors, according to Gigabyte
This is complete BS. A three year service life may be the norm for bootleg Chinese knockoffs of Japanese parts but quality Aluminum electrolytics can last far longer.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Gold Plated Speaker wire crowd will love this.
Ahem. :)
Speaking as an "audio dick," I feel I should come to the defense of both "solid capacitors" and gold plated speaker wire.
Firstly, gold plated speaker wire isn't gold plated to improve the capacitance or resistance properties of the wire - it's done to prevent corrosion. If you've ever heard the crackling sound an old car stereo tends to make, it's often because of corroded copper wires. It's particularly noticeable when you live near saltwater areas or in marine applications in general.
Secondly, there is no outstanding debate in the industry on whether or not polypropylene, film, or even tantalum capacitors (what they're referring to as solid, though they're probably talking about tantalums) are of superior quality to electrolytics for audio applications. Electrolytics have changing thermal characteristics, worse tolerances, and tend to introduce a small amount of phase shift into whatever AC signal you're passing through them. Yes, these properties are measurable with the right equipment and are not generally questioned.
And yes I am an electrical engineer!A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
The little caps near the expansion slots are for power decoupling. There are usually lots of them and the loss of one will not affect anything as long as it does not short out. The bigger switching converter caps near the CPU are a critical component of the switching power supply, and losing one would definitely kill the mobo and possibly the CPU. They are also the ones most likely to explode or leak, since they do a lot more work and are exposed to much higher temperatures.
I've had a Gigabyte board with solid-state capacitors for more than 3 months now, it's based on the 965 chipset, so I was a bit confused why this article made it sound like this was a new innovation.
I'll stick to my vacuum tubes. Not only is the technology well-tested over the years, you can heat up the entire house if your computer room is in the basement.
What you really want are Leyden Jars.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Firstly, WTF are film/foil capacitors? As far as I am aware, the only major types of capacitors used are:
Are you thinking of resistors? I use thin-film SMT resistors all the time...
Which part of the crossover are we talking about? Which design do you use? Do you have inductors in there? Quite a few performance issues when using electrolytic capacitors are due to an inappropriate choice of inductors, IMHO.
Also, I've got a friend who does psycho-acoustics research, and he did an interesting series of experiments a couple of years ago that indicated that systems that performed technically very well (almost perfect filter characteristics, no harmonic errors) actually were rated worse than a system that had all sorts of junk spewing out of it, when the audiophiles participating weren't told which system they were listening to...
Pirate Party UK
Funny, you sort of go completely past the point of the *actual* difference between ceramic condensators and electrolytic condensators, which is that one's polarized and the other isn't. They're not interchangable.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
The capacitance is proportional to the surface area of the conducting plate and inversely proportional to the distance between the plates. It is also proportional to the permittivity of the dielectric (that is, non-conducting) substance that separates the plates.
So, if I understand that text correctly, you can create a smaller capacitor with the same capacity to store charge as a vacuum-gap capacitor by placing an appropriate dielectric material between the plates.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those that need closure
No, the real difference is the amount of capacitance. I wonder what a 100uf ceramic disc cap would look like, a frisbee?
Anytime you have two conductors separated by an insulator you have a capacitor, or at least capacitance.
If you put a sheet of wax paper between two sheets of aluminum foil, that's a capacitor. If you replace the wax paper with a layer of air, it's still a capacitor. If you replace the air with a vacuum, it's still a capacitor. You can even replace the vacuum with a non-conductive liquid. It'll still be a capacitor.
As long as whatever separates the two conductors is an insulator, then you've got a capacitor.
Electrolytic capacitors use stuff that's a sort of paste, or "goo", which, combined with a layer of oxidation on the inner surface of one of the conductors, makes up the insulator. "Solid" capacitors use something that's, well, solid.
If you have a further interest, Googling for "capacitor disease" may prove instructional.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
- The Great Capacitor Scare of 2003
- Leaking Capacitors Muck Up Motherboards
- Illicit Leaky Capacitors Killing Motherboards
==> only error of GP: the formula muck-up was not intentional, but the thieves themselves made the error while copying it.For the full story see www.badcaps.net
Input error. Replace user and press any key to continue.
As a CmpE (currently working in I.T.), I will tell you that electrolytics are absolutely fine. I have electronics from the 60's and 70's with electrolytics that hold up. If the manufacturing process is botched, something may go wrong. But you can end up with a mess also if you manfacture tants, micas, polypropylene, even ceramic disc capacitors incorrectly. "Solid" capacitors are more of a sure-fire thing, but they can fail, too.
actually you can get non-polarised electrolytics too, they are often used in loudspeaker crossover circuits, i think they are basically two ordinary electrolytics in inverse series.
but anyway in most cases (especially in digital equipment like computers) capacitors are used in a way that keeps them biased the same way all the time so it doesn't really matter if they are polarised or not.
i agree with the gp that the important characteristics of electrolytics are big and slow (high ESR) while the important ones of ceramic are small and fast (low ESR).
tantalums are fairly big and fairly fast, they also have much better lifetime characteristics than electrolytics. The downside is that they are expensive and when they do go bang (tantalums are polarised) they tend to fragment into a shower of tiny hot high velocity shrapnel.
Its unclear from TFA if the "solid capacitors" gigabyte are reffering to are tantalums or some new technology.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Wrongo, Bub. Wire strands are usually tin-plated to reduce corrosion and improve solderability.
Nobody, but nobody gold-plates wire, even for the most demanding aerospace and military applications. I've taken apart Titan missle guidance computers, Mil-spec avionics, even old satellite guts and havent found an inch of gold-plated wire.
Now connector edges and IC and transistor leads that are going into sockets are often gold-plated. And I've even seen a very few Sprague electrolytic capacitors, MIL-spec, maybe one in a million, with gold-plated leads. But not wire.
> and tend to introduce a small amount of phase shift into whatever AC signal you're passing through them.
Wrongo again Bub. As you should know, the phase shift is proportional to the capacitance, and NOTHING ELSE. So a 100uF electrolytic capacitor will have EXACTLY the same phase shift as a polypropylene capacitor of the same value. And doubly false, as electrolytics are hardly ever used anywhere in their phase-shifting frequency range-- they're almost always used at frequencies where they're nearly dead shorts to AC and near zero phase angle. Exceptioin-- old cruddy speakers used non-polarized electrolytics in their phase-shifting range, but that's about it.
>And yes I am an electrical engineer! :D
Yep, I've met way too many EE's that don't recall the basic physical facts.
Power supply filter capacitors are generally added in excess so that there is plenty of margin. Losing one will reduce this margin for that area of the board, kind of like overclocking where you increase the chance of error. When you crushed the capacitor, you probably also shorted its terminals together, and when you cleaned it up, you probably un-shorted them again.
As an ex electrical engineer, I can say there are two things you remember about capacitors when designing a circuit:
. 25)
1) If signal consistency is important to you, never use an RC oscillator
2) If you need it to last at least as long as you work there, always use a cap with a voltage of ceil((inputSignal.average+inputSignal.stddev*3)*1
These ifs are usually rhetorical; you always want signal consistency, and you always want it to last as long as you can be held responsible for it. Period.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Ceramics. Small and fast. Typically used for decoupling (small charge storage).
Also used in filtering applicationsTantalums are also electrolytics. The electrolyte allows for larger capacitance in a given area. You REALLY don't want them to be reverse biased, and they have a bad tendency to explode if inrush current is too high. You don't want to use a tantalum as a DC block in audio circuits.
You also forgot some other capacitor types: polystyrene, mica, etc. These guys tend to be physically larger than a ceramic for a given capacitance, but they're a lot more stable. (And more expensive.) You'll find them in filter and integrator circuits, in high-frequency stuff, anywhere where stability is required.