7 Jun
2005
7 Jun
'05
10:06 a.m.
Greetings:
Interesting stuff. I'm learning more about mobos than I ever wanted to
know. :)
However: No brown goo on the caps, no bulging components, so I don't
think it's the capacitors. The fact that the machine is dying right at
the start seems to indicate that the problem may be either RAM or the
power supply. I'll check the RAM in another machine within a day or two,
if it's okay then I'll try switching out the power supply.
What a PITA.
Btw, big thanks to whoever mentioned the ide to usb connector. That
could be a real show-saver.
Best regards,
dp
Jonathan Woithe wrote:
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