7 Jun
2005
7 Jun
'05
6:04 a.m.
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
7 Jun
7 Jun
9:36 a.m.
On Tuesday 07 June 2005 04:06, Jonathan Woithe wrote:
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.
For the full story, see:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/feb03/ncap.html
Cheers!
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. | Director of Broadcast Software Development |
| | Salem Radio Labs |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| I looked out my window, and saw Kyle Petty's car upside down, then I |
| thought "one of us is in real trouble". |
| -- Davey Allison, on a 150 mph crash |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
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
12:27 p.m.
On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 08:40:31AM -0400, Dave Phillips wrote:
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.
Yep, hardware failures are no fun.
I'd guess the RAM too; I had a bad stick several years ago that
gave me gradually increasing kernel panics. Stupidly, I had no way
to back up everything at the time, only small documents to floppy,
and a forced reboot after one panic triggered a fsck on startup
during which the system crashed AGAIN rendering the disk unmountable.
That was fun I can tell you. I did eventually retrieve all my data
after replacing the RAM, but it took about two days of nonstop work.
since then I have set myself up with redundant hard drives,
occasional CD-RW and DVD-R backups, and journalling filesystems :-)
--
Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com
1:03 p.m.
On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 10:27:02AM -0400, Paul Winkler wrote:
Yep, hardware failures are no fun.
The deeper I get into the hardware world (day job) the scarier it is. You
know how some PSUs cost more than others? Sometimes a lot more? There
are reasons for that. Ditto RAM.
I'm frankly amazed that we all get by without ECC on *every* machine.
It's frightening.
Tim
1:32 p.m.
The deeper I get into the hardware world (day job) the scarier it is. You
know how some PSUs cost more than others? Sometimes a lot more? There
are reasons for that. Ditto RAM.
Power supplies that go into an OEM product tend to get a lot of engineering
resources thrown at them. But the end user has neither the time, tools,
nor the experitse to deal with all that, so lots of cheap, junk power supplies
get used. Plus, people generally only read the total watts, not the inidvidual
currents and additive wattage of +3.3V, +5V, and +12V.
Also, there are power supply vendors that use sub-spec wire and connectors.
The power supply can deliver to voltage and current, but the wiring harness is not
capable of delivering that to the motherboard and peripherials. They are betting
that no one or a rare few will actually get near the max. requirements, so shave
pennies off each supply in a mis-guided attempt to reduce costs.
I'm frankly amazed that we all get by without ECC
on *every* machine.
It's frightening.
Not really. Most home users/workstations use 2 to 4 DIMMs at most. And
even then, most of that is not active. So a transient memory error rarely
has a chance to be noticed.
When you expect 60% to 80% memory utilization 24x7, and the number of DIMMs
increases, then the chances of hitting a memory error are more likely. Some
systems in the field are running 4 TB of ram. That's a lot of DIMMs. The
first few months deployed are real nightmares. It's not uncommon to see
200 DIMM failures. But all those are not always real, they may be transistive.
And most error logging for memory errors is pretty poor, so finding a root
cause is diffcult.
Bob
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days inactive
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linux-audio-dev@lists.linuxaudio.org
5 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
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Bob Sanders -
Dave Phillips -
Fred Gleason -
Jonathan Woithe -
Paul Winkler -
Tim Hockin