Re: The Hall of Shame - Badcaps Photo Montage
Sometimes there is no choice but to crowd 'lytics around hot components given the meticulous design of a motherboard or power supply. Yes, heat can easily be conducted to other components through the PCB substrate and traces. Delta is one of the companies to have nicely avoided crowding lytics around other components in their PSU designs, at least their older ones.
Most series from LTEC (and just about every series I've seen from OST) will eventually fail quicker than not with enough heat and ripple current (ambient and internal heating) applied. The only series from LTEC that seems to be somewhat an exception to that, in my experience anyway, is LZG. LZP, LXY, LYZ, LTG, TH, TK, etc, I've seen fail on numerous occasions, have not seen too many failed LZGs though (besides very bad batches but that plagues upon all Taiwanese brands, including Taicon... anyway, LZG is rated for twice the endurance that LZP is with slightly larger case sizes and is about equal in ESR and ripple ratings).
LZG is the series Delta usually uses (or used to use more) and I know their PSUs (except maybe the really lower end ones) are engineered well enough for bad capacitors to last well beyond the useful life of the PSU, but I've seen LZG do surprisingly well in other places too (at least visually), such as Apple G4, G5, and IMAC PSUs, on +5VSB circuits, in SFF PSUs where all sorts of coils and capacitors are bunched up together, etc. The only place where I've actually seen them fail constantly is under discolorating heat of LCD monitors, or even scorchingly hot PSUs in LCD TVs, laptop bricks that can burn skin, or in cars where all areas pretty much have extreme temperature swings, and also when they're placed next to diodes that run so hot as to be discolorating, etc. Also, in power supplies where I do see capacitors visually bad, it's usually the Teapo SCs or CapXon GLs that go (again, visually) bad and not the LTEC LZGs. The original Xbox power supplies from Delta, like the ones from Foxlink, always had yellow warning labels on the heatsink - those things ran too hot to touch - yet the LZGs always survived.
Not saying LZG is good, I'm sure the aluminum foil has the same Taiwanese impurities (such as too much copper) that all Taiwanese capacitors pretty much have, just saying that their other series seem not to hold up nearly as well. Also, Lite-on PSUs usually have a pretty 'crowded' design despite the use of quality components minus the choice of capacitors and possibly ADDA sleeve bearing fans.
I have little direct experience with MBs, but pocketing lytics with hot components on all sides is never a good idea. Between the nice short and fat traces from the MOSFET Source leads to (apparently) the caps and the nice beefy Source bond wires inside the MOSFET, the heat of the MOSFETs would have been conducted very "nicely" from the MOSFETs to the cap leads connected to the Source leads. Beefy traces and wires are good conductors of heat as well as of current.
Originally posted by PeteS in CA
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LZG is the series Delta usually uses (or used to use more) and I know their PSUs (except maybe the really lower end ones) are engineered well enough for bad capacitors to last well beyond the useful life of the PSU, but I've seen LZG do surprisingly well in other places too (at least visually), such as Apple G4, G5, and IMAC PSUs, on +5VSB circuits, in SFF PSUs where all sorts of coils and capacitors are bunched up together, etc. The only place where I've actually seen them fail constantly is under discolorating heat of LCD monitors, or even scorchingly hot PSUs in LCD TVs, laptop bricks that can burn skin, or in cars where all areas pretty much have extreme temperature swings, and also when they're placed next to diodes that run so hot as to be discolorating, etc. Also, in power supplies where I do see capacitors visually bad, it's usually the Teapo SCs or CapXon GLs that go (again, visually) bad and not the LTEC LZGs. The original Xbox power supplies from Delta, like the ones from Foxlink, always had yellow warning labels on the heatsink - those things ran too hot to touch - yet the LZGs always survived.
Not saying LZG is good, I'm sure the aluminum foil has the same Taiwanese impurities (such as too much copper) that all Taiwanese capacitors pretty much have, just saying that their other series seem not to hold up nearly as well. Also, Lite-on PSUs usually have a pretty 'crowded' design despite the use of quality components minus the choice of capacitors and possibly ADDA sleeve bearing fans.
i see conductive gorilla snot in the PSUs too.
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