I work at a VAR that assembles our own white box clones. We have had a
failure rate of almost 15% of Shuttle AV11 motherboards. Every example
has popped or leaking caps. These boards were installed in late 2000
and the first half of 2001. The first symptom is random and repeated
reboots. We had switched to AOpen motherboards at the beginning of
this year and have had no other failures. However, we have around 500
of the AV11's out in the field. AV22 and AV18 Shuttle's don't appear to
have problems.
Ethan Dicks 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
them obviously didn't matter as to the exact capacitance (decoupling
caps), others, in the onboard voltage regulator area, probably did
matter.
Interesting to learn of a cause some months later, though.
-ethan
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search new jobs daily now
http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/