The Hall of Shame - Badcaps Photo Montage

[RJARRRPCGP]

Originally Posted by diamon

rated for 1000 Watts, for one split second I think. 1000 watts > PMPO power

Starkly reminds me of an off-brand ATX PSU's marketing watts.

[maximus3x]

hola

[maximus3x]

hola es una pru

[kevin!]

typical fault in ECS MCP61SM-AM (used in HP and Acer)
The OST and TK failed when the computer had more or less 60,000h.
I just failed with 70,000h (the HDD is original, and marks 70,000h of use, because its owner never turned it off).
Interestingly, all g-luxon are fine: O
But I'll be honest, I'm impressed that this board has endured so many hours, and the chipset being an nforce with IGPU has never failed the FCBGA.

[RukyCon]

Generic "CIA LOW ESR" 10uf 400v. Died in under 4 hours in a "2 amp" power supply.

[momaka]

Originally Posted by kevin!

typical fault in ECS MCP61SM-AM (used in HP and Acer)
The OST and TK failed when the computer had more or less 60,000h.
I just failed with 70,000h (the HDD is original, and marks 70,000h of use, because its owner never turned it off).

Mine failed at a little less than that. Also, my board had TK, OST, and Sanyo WF caps. Despite Sanyo being considered a good brand, their WF series are problematic - same as other early ultra-low ESR Japanese cap series, like United Chemicon KZG/KZJ (and Rubycon MCZ to an extent.) The OST caps were RLS, IIRC, so they didn't have issues. Still, I recapped most of mine preemptively.

Originally Posted by kevin!

But I'll be honest, I'm impressed that this board has endured so many hours, and the chipset being an nforce with IGPU has never failed the FCBGA.

Maybe it ran in a cooler environment/ambient? I can tell you that at "standard" room temperature of 77F / 25C, the chipset HS gets scorching hot and certainly won't last long. Mine's starting to fail - it looses the LAN port on cold boot if room temperature is below 64F / 18C. Also had the USB ports panic last summer, hogging all the system interrupts with requests (and bogging the CPU down.) After disabling Enhanced USB (USB 2.0 capability), the interrupt panics stopped. Re-enabling Enhanced USB controller brought back the panics. Eventually, I got mad at the thing and punched the chipset HS. Must have been the right force, because that instantly fixed the USB 2.0 issues. Now working fine again. And the LAN port has been a lot less problematic at cold boot.

So solution for faulty/dieing GeForce 6100/6150 chipsets: punch them! But not too hard
.
.
.
Or just put a 40 mm fan on it, to prevent all of that, if possible.

Originally Posted by ruky con

Generic "CIA LOW ESR" 10uf 400v. Died in under 4 hours in a "2 amp" power supply.

Caps developed by the CIA? LOL

[RukyCon]

Originally Posted by momaka

Caps developed by the CIA? LOL

I don't think they're developed by the CIA but they seem to be very common in cheaper power supplies, this is the first one i've had fail and boy it stunk.

[BigTroll]

Originally Posted by momaka

Mine failed at a little less than that. Also, my board had TK, OST, and Sanyo WF caps. Despite Sanyo being considered a good brand, their WF series are problematic - same as other early ultra-low ESR Japanese cap series, like United Chemicon KZG/KZJ (and Rubycon MCZ to an extent.) The OST caps were RLS, IIRC, so they didn't have issues. Still, I recapped most of mine preemptively.


Maybe it ran in a cooler environment/ambient? I can tell you that at "standard" room temperature of 77F / 25C, the chipset HS gets scorching hot and certainly won't last long. Mine's starting to fail - it looses the LAN port on cold boot if room temperature is below 64F / 18C. Also had the USB ports panic last summer, hogging all the system interrupts with requests (and bogging the CPU down.) After disabling Enhanced USB (USB 2.0 capability), the interrupt panics stopped. Re-enabling Enhanced USB controller brought back the panics. Eventually, I got mad at the thing and punched the chipset HS. Must have been the right force, because that instantly fixed the USB 2.0 issues. Now working fine again. And the LAN port has been a lot less problematic at cold boot.

So solution for faulty/dieing GeForce 6100/6150 chipsets: punch them! But not too hard
.
.
.
Or just put a 40 mm fan on it, to prevent all of that, if possible.


Caps developed by the CIA? LOL

Ha, thats gold right there! I was working on a HP slimline nvidia chipset computer today myself has a athlon ii x2, it was running like dog poop.

[Wester547]

Originally Posted by momaka

Mine failed at a little less than that. Also, my board had TK, OST, and Sanyo WF caps. Despite Sanyo being considered a good brand, their WF series are problematic - same as other early ultra-low ESR Japanese cap series, like United Chemicon KZG/KZJ (and Rubycon MCZ to an extent.) The OST caps were RLS, IIRC, so they didn't have issues. Still, I recapped most of mine preemptively.

Well, compared to KZG, WF, and the very early HM/HN at least, I found that MCZ was far less failure prone. I lost count of how many motherboards I saw bad KZG, WF, and HM/HN on whilst the MCZs (on the same board) were doing just fine. Despite their heat sensitivity, at least they don’t bulge and leak of their own volition like many batches of the former four series.

Also, lately I’ve found the early batches of WG and even WX to age poorly, and fail with high leakage current, just like HM, HN, and HZ. In my experience, as far as early ultra low ESR caps go, only MBZ and FJ/FL seem to be safe (even though they’re not impervious to failure, but what cap is?). As far as early “mid grade low ESR” caps go, I’ve had excellent experiences with Rubycon ZL, NCC KZE, and Panasonic FM (which is corroborated by them doing well in Pete’s torture tests from 10+ years ago). Nichicon HD less so but I find they are generally much better than the problematic UESR series mentioned above.

That said... I will still take all the above series over Sacon FZ.

[RukyCon]

I currently have a PC set aside with a motherboard full of leaking capacitors, most of the caps are Sanyo WF and OST RLX and just about all of the sanyo WF caps are bulging/leaking while all of the OST caps look fine.

[kevin!]

Originally Posted by momaka

Mine failed at a little less than that. Also, my board had TK, OST, and Sanyo WF caps. Despite Sanyo being considered a good brand, their WF series are problematic - same as other early ultra-low ESR Japanese cap series, like United Chemicon KZG/KZJ (and Rubycon MCZ to an extent.) The OST caps were RLS, IIRC, so they didn't have issues. Still, I recapped most of mine preemptively.


Maybe it ran in a cooler environment/ambient? I can tell you that at "standard" room temperature of 77F / 25C, the chipset HS gets scorching hot and certainly won't last long. Mine's starting to fail - it looses the LAN port on cold boot if room temperature is below 64F / 18C. Also had the USB ports panic last summer, hogging all the system interrupts with requests (and bogging the CPU down.) After disabling Enhanced USB (USB 2.0 capability), the interrupt panics stopped. Re-enabling Enhanced USB controller brought back the panics. Eventually, I got mad at the thing and punched the chipset HS. Must have been the right force, because that instantly fixed the USB 2.0 issues. Now working fine again. And the LAN port has been a lot less problematic at cold boot.

So solution for faulty/dieing GeForce 6100/6150 chipsets: punch them! But not too hard
.
.
.
Or just put a 40 mm fan on it, to prevent all of that, if possible.


Caps developed by the CIA? LOL

I did not know that Sanyo failed, I have had several WFs and I have not seen any bloated.
Thanks for the warning, I'll keep it in mind.
If I tell the truth, I do not know what environment it was in, but it was in an Acer case, it was probably working at a low temperature.
I do the same to the problematic chips, you put them on a fan and surprisingly the useful life is very long.
had a gt8300 with passive heatsink of the defective series, I put a fan and never failed.

Surely the company used industrial espionage to obtain the formula for the capacitor.

[Dan81]

Originally Posted by momaka

So solution for faulty/dieing GeForce 6100/6150 chipsets: punch them! But not too hard

Sounds like what I had to do on a Fujitsu-Siemens Amillo D7820 - SIS961 southbridge was half dead - literally took a hammer to it, and somehow the whole laptop came back to life, and worked for a long time before finally the LCD inverter board died with glorious sparks. Initially ran 98SE then XP SP3 towards its end of life.

[PeteS in CA]

It's weird to think that my time as the Torquemada of Capacitors was that many years and two employers ago. It was fun, but the commute was ~75 miles a day, .

[momaka]

Originally Posted by Wester547

Despite their heat sensitivity, at least they don’t bulge and leak of their own volition like many batches of the former four series.

Agreed.
MCZ/MFZ is fine, as long as they aren't or weren't overheated previously.

Originally Posted by Wester547

Also, lately I’ve found the early batches of WG and even WX to age poorly, and fail with high leakage current, just like HM, HN, and HZ.

Ah, good to know. (Well, not really, as I have some old stuff with these and not too excited about that news. )
Might explain why ASUS CUR-DLS has had issues. A year ago, it got corrupt CMOS settings and couldn't detect the SCSI controller until CMOS was reset. Fixed that and it worked for a while. Now it no longer POSTs properly (or rather, hangs after POST.) Maybe it's time to go back where it came from? Shame, because it's a dual-P3 board with on-board SCSI. No AGP slot, though.

Originally Posted by Wester547

As far as early “mid grade low ESR” caps go, I’ve had excellent experiences with Rubycon ZL, NCC KZE, and Panasonic FM (which is corroborated by them doing well in Pete’s torture tests from 10+ years ago).

Yes, I've never hard a single problem with those either.
Also, one could argue that Panasonic FR and FM are reasonably close in specs to UESR series like KZG, HM, and MBZ. So for recapping old motherboards with big caps, I think FR and FM is a pretty safe bet.

Originally Posted by Wester547

That said... I will still take all the above series over Sacon FZ.

Sacon FZ is literally cat urine in a can, waiting to boil, pop, and fizz (FZZZZ... oh, now I get the series name. )

Originally Posted by BigTroll

Ha, thats gold right there! I was working on a HP slimline nvidia chipset computer today myself has a athlon ii x2, it was running like dog poop.

Well, the low-end Athlon II X2 chips are just only slightly faster than the older AM2 X2 chips clock-for-clock, so no surprise there. That said, once you go above 3 GHz, they're very decent for everyday use.

That said, if the PC you were working on had a GF6100/6150 chipset, expect it to do poorly for HD video acceleration. I rebuilt a system like that with Athlon II X2 215 last week, and it couldn't do 720p video @ 60 FPS very smoothly on YouTube. Added an old GeForce 8600 GT video card in the system, and even that outdated GPU helped off-load the CPU a lot more.

Originally Posted by Dan81

Sounds like what I had to do on a Fujitsu-Siemens Amillo D7820 - SIS961 southbridge was half dead - literally took a hammer to it, and somehow the whole laptop came back to life, and worked for a long time before finally the LCD inverter board died with glorious sparks. Initially ran 98SE then XP SP3 towards its end of life.

Nice!
Sometimes, the best fixes are the most simple ones.

Speaking of which, I just found out that one "dead" mobo I had sitting for years is actually OK. After literally checking everything on it and trying whatnot, I decided to press hard on the CPU socket (s775 BGA). Welp, that did it - mobo POSTed as if nothing was wrong with it. I released pressure from CPU socket area, and it was "dead" again. Repeated once more, just to confirm.

Bleh. Screw BGA sockets!

[RukyCon]

4x Sanyo WF 1800uf, 6.3V.
These are on the same motherboard i mentioned in a previous post.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Originally Posted by ruky con

4x Sanyo WF 1800uf, 6.3V.
These are on the same motherboard i mentioned in a previous post.

I hope Sanyo aren't bad now...

[Wester547]

Sanyo’s WF series has issues with long-term reliability. I would not deem Sanyo (Suncon) a bad brand just because of that one series. I’ve seen quite a few ECS motherboards from 2009~2010, loaded with 1800µF 6.3V Sanyo WF and a few 1000µF 6.3V Sanyo WG. The Sanyo WF seem to fail quite often while the WG seem to be okay, along with the rest of the caps. I guess you could chalk this up to the WF being in more stressful locations (on the output of buck regulators, high ripple current duty), but I take it as more of an indication that the WF series is just plain unreliable.

[RJARRRPCGP]

I just hope the WFs aren't resleeved Samxon GFs!

[Stefan Payne]

Originally Posted by Wester547

In many GPS-350 series units, for an example (made in 2005 or thereabouts), I found that it’s always the CapXon GL on the +12V rail (or +5VSB) that’s bad whilst the LTEC LTG/LZG and Taicon PW are almost always fine.

I blame shitty design for that. Or are you talking about the same PSU with different Capacitos??

The Design is too often overlooked when the Cap goes bad...

That Teapo SC go bad in a Flex ATX PSU, after ~7-10 Years should be obvious, shouldn't it?

Originally Posted by Wester547

I also saw a number of Hipro units and QDI motherboards where the Teapo capacitors (SEK and SC series) failed and the LTEC LZP/LZG were still okay.

Teapo SEK on a Motherboard? :|
That's a General Purpose capacitor...
Anyway, LZP is a bit above Teapo SC (wich is/was 2000h in 10mm if downsize IIRC), LZP can be double that.
LZG is even better than that and has at a bare minimum 4000h lifetime.

[Wester547]

Originally Posted by Stefan Payne

I blame shitty design for that. Or are you talking about the same PSU with different Capacitos??

The Design is too often overlooked when the Cap goes bad...

Delta actually design their PSUs such that the output caps are not stressed. That’s how lesser esteemed brands such as LTEC and Taicon can survive in very old Delta PSUs.

Teapo SEK on a Motherboard? :|
That's a General Purpose capacitor...
Anyway, LZP is a bit above Teapo SC (wich is/was 2000h in 10mm if downsize IIRC), LZP can be double that.
LZG is even better than that and has at a bare minimum 4000h lifetime.

It’s not uncommon to find general purpose capacitors on elderly motherboards. It’s okay to use them so long as they are only used on the output of linear regulators or -maybe- as general output filters (I/O filtering, etc) on really old motherboards.