It not so much the cost of the caps but also the cost of labor to
replace them. With the cost of a ATX motherboard for a P4 with intel
chipset and onboard intel lan, sound and video running around $70.00,
it's not economically sound to have a tech spend 30 minutes to replace
a $10.00 worth of caps. The company charges $130 per hour for my time,
so 30 minutes to replace the caps, parts cost and checkout time after
repair makes it too expensive an ordeal. The combined time and parts
cost is a lot higher than simply replacing the board.
A lot of the boards that have failed in our boxes have also had trace
damage from corrosive electrolyte eating away the copper, but a few have
shorted hard enough to blow the voltage regulators completely off the
board.
James
Tony Duell wrote:
>>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
>>
>>
>
>I don't know how many capapcitors there were on each board, but
>considering you'd probably get most of them for <$0.50 each at 1-off
>prices, they must have been _very_ poor motherboards...
>
>
>
>>them obviously didn't matter as to the exact capacitance (decoupling
>>caps), others, in the onboard voltage regulator area, probably did
>>matter.
>>
>>
>
>I doubt it. Electrolytics are rarely used if the value is critical (the
>tolerance is pretty wide on such components).
>
>-tony
>
>
>
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Received on Wed Nov 06 2002 - 07:20:04 GMT