The article I read on this subject was fairly alarming
- the way business works these days, most of the
capacitor electrolyte came from one company that
supplied many different cap manufacturers in Taiwan,
good, bad and indifferent. This may affect a lot more
than PC's. Like, every piece of electronics made
recently in the Far East with a switching power
supply.
--- Ethan Dicks <erd_6502(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
--- Brian Chase <vaxzilla(a)jarai.org> wrote:
Someone passed this along to me today. It's
a
current news item, but I
though it at least tangentially relevant to
classiccmp folks. You'll
get a bang out of this one--quite literally:
-> In September 2002, reports started to surface
in the United States
-> among brand name computer manufacturers
that
there were problems
-> with low-ESR aluminum capacitors produced
in
Taiwan...
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/
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search new jobs daily now