The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

[handyrandyrc]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

I feel all giddy and excited about this test. I'm such a nerd now.

[pentium]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

We should start betting on what will go first.

[Shroomie]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

I'm betting on the power supplies.

This is gonna take a while.

[Topcat]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

My money is on the power cords.... Unless I get mad and snip one in two or Willawake's cat comes and chews on one, those will never fail!!!

I'll take more readings next week sometime. I would have them folding, but at present, they are not located anywhere near the switch, so they have no network to them at the moment. The burn-in utilities are keeping them plenty busy though, stuffed in a sweltering hot closet!

[gdement]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

When you pull the boards to take readings, you might as well rotate the boards into a different chassis/psu each time. That would even out any variations that might exist between the PSU's and the amount of heat inside each case. Assuming the setups are identical it wouldn't create any extra work - they would just boot right up and run without knowing the difference.

It's an interesting test, I'm looking forward to what happens after the caps get beat up some more.

[archae86]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

Once again, I can not thank Antec enough for their contributions to this project!!

I selected the Antec 'SOLO' ATX mid tower.

After seeing the Solo here, and reading Williwake's and Topcat's favorable comments, I looked into it and selected it for my new PC build. I'm tired of listening to the fans on my PCs, so the provision of several quiet features (mounting on rather flexible grommets for the hard drives, and space for two 92mm front fans and one 120mm rear fan) together with a design that suited my taste better than any of the gamer-oriented radical stuff made me give it a try.

With two purchased Antec TriCool 92mms in front pushing air in, and the as-shipped 120mm TriCool in back, the case with its stock Core 2 Due E6600 Cooled by an Freezer 7 Pro is almost silent at a 47 degree C temperature running flat out on a pair of Distributed Computing applications. However the MCH chipset chip is a bit warmer than I really like, so I bumped up the front fans to medium. It is surprising how much extra sound you get going from 1150 to 1600 rpm on a pair of 92mm fans.

Anyway I like it so much I'm planning to repackage a four year-old 3.2 GHz Gallatin 8-drive system into this package. As TopCat mentioned, the weakest point for me on the case is the plastic front-panel--in particular the cutouts around the floppy drive. It is quite tricky to get the door shut without popping the panel out, though no harm done.

[Topcat]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

Readings taken again last night. Systems allowed to cool for 5 hours, to room temp (about 70*F), all systems holding at readings of 0.10 OHM's ESR (the lowest the meter will read). They're back up and running, I'll take readings again in another month.......may they duke it out with honor!!

[Fizzycapola]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

This could go on for years. They are 3 of the best caps not known to ever really fail.

archae86
I notice I can hear any fans over 1000RPM easily, but 1300RPM+ particularly annoying on large fans. On my smaller system I'm using 80mm Sharkoon "Golfball Style Fins" ~800RPM for intakes with professional dust filters, they're sleeve bearing, but I don't mind they're very silent, turning PC on or off you cannot know the difference, apart from the sound of electric flowing. I just wish I didn't have to put a great noisy fan on the CPU. =(

[Topcat]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

Readings taken yesterday, again, no changes on any brand. May the battle continue!!

[mutant]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

Keep up the great work Topcat. I think this is definately a worthwhile long term test.
Just letting you know it is very much appreciated.

M

[whiz]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

any updates?

[Topcat]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

I took readings a couple weeks ago. I just forgot to post them.....sorry. There were no fluctuations in ESR readings, all systems still solid as a rock... It may take a year or so before we start to see degradation.

[PeteS in CA]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

Keep in mind that there are but 172 hours in a week, and if the ambient temp and ripple current to which those caps are subjected are reasonable, it could take much more than a year for changes to show up. So TC should have you visiting his site for years to come, .

[threepointone]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

I've got a lot of electronics experience but not much experience on these forums, so if I've missed something sorry

a) why use FC when FM is better in almost every respect?

b) this is a real-world test, which is always a great (but PAINFULLY long) way of testing things. If you really want to test a capacitor's specs, stick it in some sort of temperature regulated, 105*C oven, apply maximum ripple current (which is AC current, pretty much), and wait. If what the manufacturers say is correct, the caps should last for 2000 hours under these conditions, or about 3 months, which is still pretty darn long. IIRC, the rule of thumb for capacitor life is something like 2x the rated # of hours for each 10*C (or was it 5*C?) drop in temperature from the maximum temperature (usually 105*C). I'm pretty sure this isn't even close to what your caps are running at. At 95*C, you're lookng at 166 days, about half a year; 85*C, a full year; 75*C, two years, and so on. The exact temperature your caps are at would depend on the ripple current and the ambient temperature. Additionally, this is at its MAXIMUM ripple current; if your cpu's power supply doesn't have much ripple, it should take EVEN LONGER. Even so, the 2000 hour rating only refers to the point when the capacitance, dissipation factor, and leakage current are still in spec--not when the cap explodes. The ESR test someone did was a good way to tell if the cap was out of spec, though I'm not entirely sure how fast it rises with time.

So, it might be a very, very, very long time until the caps go bad, unless one of them is truly crap. However, this does go to show exactly how absolutely crapalicious those bad mobo caps were before: iirc, they blew in 500 hours not even at their maximum rated conditions. I wouldn't be surprised if their actual life ratings were somewhere on the order of, say, 10 hours or so!!

c) Another thing with the test: all the caps have different ripple current ratings and different ESR ratings. The most obvious problem would be that the capacitor life is based on maximum ripple current. However, it doesn't get that simple. To understand how ESR will affect the life of the capacitor, you have to know that capacitors block DC but let higher frequency AC (well, up to a point depending on the capacitor) through. The point of the big electrolytic caps is to "short out" and remove the AC signal (in other words, the noise) from the Vcore line, which ideally needs pure DC for the CPU to be as stable as possible. So, at AC, the capacitor is sort of like a resistor and will allow current to flow through. And when current flows through something, it'll create heat. Considering that the thermal conductivity of capacitors must be low so that it's not electrically conductive (in other words, capacitor cases are horrible heatsinks), you could be looking at pretty big temperature variations among capacitors--and again, temperature is a factor in capacitor life.


After all that, don't get me wrong--I think this is a great, real-world test of these capacitors. It will definitely weed out any caps which last shorter than they're rated for, and it's much better than testing capacitors in artificial conditions. Even if the capacitors aren't all rated exactly the same, engineers will still end up having to choose one of these (though personally I still doubt that panasonic fc would be a good choice for a motherboard given its specs) and it's a great way to see how all the real-world variables interact to determine the actual operating life of a capacitor in a motherboard application.

I would really recommend getting an ESR meter that can read down to the milliohm range, as .10 ohm is really way, way too high of a range to be useful when dealing with low-esr capacitors.

Good luck! whoa, I hope that doesn't take too long to read

[gonzo0815]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

Well, the Panasonic FC are probably one of the best and very very matured capacitor series apart from some Rubycon series like ZL etc.
Furthermore they are Japanese made and are not water based.
So, may be the FM series do have better specs, but i think FC`s are a standard regarding load life, quality, and reliability.

A better ESR test would may be nice, but i think those small changes are not that important, as they do depend from a lot of factors even if it is not caused by degrading.

In real world apps, i think a 0,1Ohm value would probably not make a board or vrm unreliable.
As we have seen, apparent problems arise in most cases at far higher resistance values, than we might expect from a theoretical point of view.

[PeteS in CA]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

I would really recommend getting an ESR meter that can read down to the milliohm range, as .10 ohm is really way, way too high of a range to be useful when dealing with low-esr capacitors.

I think getting an ESR meter or LCR bridge with this kind of capability would be beyond what TC or folks here would be willing to spend. That said, when testing 5-20 milliohm ESR parts, 10 milliohm resolution will mask small changes in ESR. I wonder whether any of the old Clarke Hess (sp?) ESR meters might be available of EBay at a reasonable price.

[Topcat]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

Checked all caps again last night. No change.......... Dammit, I want one of them to blow up already!!! j/k

[CzR]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

Hey Guys,

I tought you might be intrested to know that Intel have started to use Samxon CAP, just rec. some Intel boards (DQ965GF) this afternoon and they have Samxon GD(M) 3300uF6.3v caps on them, I frikken hope Samxon turn out to be good quality or I'm going to be a very unhappy chappy in a few years.

And I just tought of something as I was writing this, damn it would have been good to also test some know crap capacitors for refrence sake, oh well to late now.

Cheers
Cezar

[shadow]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

Samxon capacitors so far have proven to be quite good. Their popularity is rising, on these forums I do not think anyone complained about the quality yet. The forum member Big Pope sells these capacitors on this forum to anyone not situated in the US.

Overall, there seem to be nothing wrong with them.

[Super Nade]

Re: The Great Capacitor Showdown - Rubycon vs Panasonic vs Samxon

Checked all caps again last night. No change.......... Dammit, I want one of them to blow up already!!! j/k

I can give you a few OST's for giggles.