Bad Capacitors

[cwl999]

Anyone had to replace any bad caps.

Whilst dysoning the dust from my Asus Pundit media center. I found one of the caps bulging badly.

Obviously, it was a ticking time bomb waiting to cause havoc. I had to strip my old P3V4X mobo to salvage some good rubycon caps.

The bad cap was manufactured by OST (a known bad) and theres ~10 of them on the mobo.

I was tempted to recap them all but didn't due to the risk of killing the mobo.

[KowShak]

I've had to replace the capacitors on a mobo, I replaced about 17 on an Abit KA7.

The thing was, the cost of the capacitors was about £20 and they were physically larger than the originals even though the spec was the same so it didn't look very tidy. It worked in the end, but since I could have had a new board for about £25 I probably should have done that instead.

Its not hard to do, just fiddly and time consuming. You'll need a reasonably powerful soldering iron with a fine tip, a point rather than a chisel and a desoldering pump and of course the new capacitors. Check how much its going to cost for a new board before you consider replacing caps.

[cwl999]

I desoldered plenty of good caps from an old mobo. Sizewise, not an issue.

I only decided to recap the single obvious faulty cap, mainly cos the system is our primary media center and everything is custom build into the case. The mobo is an ASUS special and not easily replacable. Not worth the risk of killing the mobo if I had recaped them all.

[cwl999]

Talk about bad luck. My work PC a Hell gx270 was given is problems. Turns out that the caps around the CPU were bulging more an a 36DD silicon implant

[nichomach]

Known issue with the GX270s; at least the Optis have 3yr next-day on-site as standard.

[lost eden]

Had a pair of caps go in the power supply of my shuttle (PF30) oozing orange stuff out the tops. Surprised they still worked, but this was probably just down to my quieter cooling not being quite up the job. Ended up shelling out for a new supply because the caps were glued in place by dubious amounts of insualating gunge between them & other components.

[joshwa]

Talk about bad luck. My work PC a Hell gx270 was given is problems. Turns out that the caps around the CPU were bulging more an a 36DD silicon implant

see this thread:
http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.p...ighlight=gx270

This is happening at work lots more now, 3 so far this week.
Has happened to some GX280s as well.