[linux-audio-dev] Re: [linux-audio-user] disaster day #1

[Jonathan Woithe]

vanDongen/Gilcher wrote:
> If there are little brown spots on the top of some condensers on the mobo, 
> then they are fried and you have to get a new one.(unless you fancy soldering 
> multi-layer boards)  Apperently some factories saved a few tenths of pennies 
> by using substandard parts. 

Steve Harris wrote:
> ... but If the motherboard is oldish (couple of years or so) then its
> worth eyeballing the motherboard for bulging capacitors, I lost my studio
> PC to this and we lost a load at work.
> 
> The tops should be slightly concave and clean, if theres any sign of brown
> gunge (technical term) or bulging then the motherboard is a gonner.
> 
> There was a bad batch of capacitors for a while from a major manufacturer,
> but I suspect all the bad boards have blown allready by now.

There was a bad batch of capacitors doing the rounds a few years back. I've
seen a large number of MSI K7T Turbo boards die this way as well as two HP
boards from the same era - around the time of the Athlon-900.  It wouldn't
surprise me if Dave's mainboard is suffering from these bad capacitors since
the symptoms are very close to those I've seen in the 20 or so failures I've
witnessed: the machine gets less and less stable until finally either it
doesn't boot (mostly) or the offending capacitor(s) explode (as has happened
twice in my experience).

I've been told from a reputable source that it wasn't actually the mobo
factories which did the dirty as such.  An electrolyte formula was
apparently stolen from a factory, copied at another and then stolen *again*
and passed to a third.  It was the resulting capacitors from the third
factory which, falsely branded as a reputable brand, found their way into
all these mainboards which have been dying over the past 3 or so years.

I started seeing mainboards failing in machines which run 24/7 about 3 years
ago.  Since then, mainboards with intermittant use have been showing up with
the same fault.  The last one I saw suffering this problem surfaced only a
few months ago, so there are still some out there.  From my observations it
appears related to power-on hours which, given the failure mode of the
capacitors, isn't all that surprising.

Of course this is all cold comfort for those unfortunate enough to be stuck
with a faulty board.

Regards
  jonathan