The article I read on this subject was fairly alarming
- the way business works these days, most of the
capacitor electrolyte came from one company that
supplied many different cap manufacturers in Taiwan,
good, bad and indifferent. This may affect a lot more
than PC's. Like, every piece of electronics made
recently in the Far East with a switching power
supply.
--- Ethan Dicks <erd_6502_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- Brian Chase <vaxzilla_at_jarai.org> wrote:
> > Someone passed this along to me today. It's a
> current news item, but I
> > though it at least tangentially relevant to
> classiccmp folks. You'll
> > get a bang out of this one--quite literally:
> >
> > -> In September 2002, reports started to surface
> in the United States
> > -> among brand name computer manufacturers that
> there were problems
> > -> with low-ESR aluminum capacitors produced in
> Taiwan...
>
> I have seen a couple of motherboards that were
> probably victims of
> this phenomemon. I picked up a couple of mini-ATX
> boxen from a local
> video store that flirted with being a gamer center.
> 80% of the caps
> on the motherboard had popped. There were no other
> obvious signs of
> damage as one might expect from a simple overvoltage
> problem (no
> odor, no damaged traces, no heat damage, etc.).
>
> The boards were of sufficiently low quality that it
> wasn't worth
> the effort to secure replacement caps at retail
> prices. Some of
> them obviously didn't matter as to the exact
> capacitance (decoupling
> caps), others, in the onboard voltage regulator
> area, probably did
> matter.
>
> Interesting to learn of a cause some months later,
> though.
>
> -ethan
>
>
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Received on Mon Nov 04 2002 - 22:02:00 GMT