Is your three year old computer a ticking time bomb?

Just when you thought you had heard the end of it, it rears its ugly head again.

Many of you may remember a few years back in 2000-2001 when electronics equipment of all kinds started to die from capacitor failure. For me it was a whole generation of Deer/Green (currently sold under the name of Allied) power supplies that began to pop capacitors like clockwork at three years of age. For the most part the power supplies simply shut down with a loud pop and wouldn’t start up again, however I experienced a few that took motherboards, processors, and memory with them when they went. Shortly after the power supply fiasco an entire generation of Abit boards started to fail from capacitor failure, with a few Giga-Byte boards in the mix too, and all at about the three year mark, coincidentally just out of warranty.

The reason for the capacitor failures is as bizarre as any you have heard,
“It has all the elements of a good thriller: a stolen secret formula, bungled corporate espionage, untraceable goods, and lone wolves saving the little guy from the misdeeds of multinational corporations. In this case, a mistake in the stolen formulation of the electrolyte in a capacitor has wrecked hundreds of PCs and may wreck still more in what is an industry wide problem.”
The full story can be read here at IEEE Spectrum Online:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resou...feb03/ncap.html

Things have been pretty quiet over the last couple of years. I haven’t seen a single capacitor failure come back in the computer hardware I have assembled since late 2001 early 2002. That is until this last weekend March 5 2005 when a customer machine came back with chronic stability problems. Upon inspection of the hardware it was obvious that the “Soyo K7V Dragon Plus!” motherboard was suffering the dreaded capacitor failure with two of the 35 or so capacitors leaking electrolytic compound out of the capacitors and two thirds of the rest of them swollen and showing signs of failure. All of the failing capacitors are branded Wendell but this brand is not the only one that suffers this problem.

The manufacturers that I have mentioned are not the only manufacturers to have had this problem but they are the manufacturers that I have experienced the problems with and Abit is one of the few who have even acknowledged that the problem exists at all.

What is discouraging to me is that The Soyo motherboard I replaced this last weekend was manufactured in early 2002 long after motherboard manufacturers should have known about these flawed capacitors being produced by second rate manufacturers.

Even more discouraging is the fact that I am probably going to spend the next couple months repairing machines I built in 2002 using the Soyo motherboard and perhaps other brand boards too.

So what can you do? If you have three year old hardware inspect it now! For a picture of what a capacitor looks like see the story at IEEE Spectrum Online:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resou...feb03/ncap.html
and here at Overclockers.com:
http://www.overclockers.com/tips00140/

If you find capacitors that are swollen or leaking its time to do some upgrading before your hardware fails.
Also I should point out that some motherboard manufacturers have offered to replace or repair motherboards that fail from capacitor failure, you will have to check with your motherboard manufacturer to know for sure.

There is also a related story at GEEK.com you can read it here:
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Feb/...30207018535.htm