14 Feb
2010
14 Feb
'10
11:44 p.m.
On 2/14/10 12:01 PM, "Jochen Kunz" <jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote:
On Sun, 14 Feb 2010 12:45:48 -0600
Randy Dawson <rdawson16 at hotmail.com> wrote:
Actually it's not urban legend, there was a huge problem with electrolytic
caps a few years back, and still popping up as those caps continue to filter
through various suppliers stock.
What happened is some engineers left one company for another, and they took
the electrolyte formula with them, however the formula that they had did not
have a good stabilizer in it, and the electrolyte ?boils? And leaks out of
the capacitors. A lot of the Taiwanese, Korean, Hong-Kong and Chinese cap
manufacturers ended up using the unstable electrolyte and had caps that
failed early in their lifespan. Initially PC motherboard manufacturers
denied that the problem existed until the threat of lawsuits and bad
publicity was brought to bear.
MSI for almost 2 years was replacing all the caps on my failed motherboard
for free.
There was some criminal stuff going on with
electrolytes in this era,
AFAIK this is an urban legend. And that legend was about
aluminium
electrolyte capacitors, not tantalum. Most common faild capacitors
where the low ESR types found in the CPU core voltage regulator on
PeeCee mainboards.