-=> ROY J. TELLASON wrote to SCOTT JONES <=-

 SJ> If it's any help, all the bad caps I've seen have been 1000uF or
 SJ> higher, manufactured by Luxon, on boards manufactured from about
 SJ> mid-2001 to early 2003.

 RJT> Looking at some of the non-functional or flaky boards I have here,  and
 RJT> at all the discussion that's gone by in here of late regarding flaky
 RJT> caps,  I'm beginning to wonder if perhaps this might not be the problem
 RJT> in at least some of these boards.  I don't recall seeing any with
 RJT> obvious symptoms of distress, though,  which is one of the things that
 RJT> seems to get mentioned in here fairly frequently.  And I'm not real hot
 RJT> on the idea of pulling them to test them...

Could be the problem.  The ones I keep seeing are just the ones that are
obviously bad.  Thing is, until they start going bad, you won't have any
indication of it, but by that time it's kind of obvious they are bad.

 RJT> You mention specific board manufacturers and dates of manufacture.  How

Actually, that was a cap manufacturer I mentioned above.  They're not
the only one, but they're the one I've seen the most of.
 
 RJT> did you arrive at that info?  I'm just getting started in terms of
 RJT> researching this sort of thing.

I've done some reading, but it's mostly first-hand experience.  I've
just been re-hired by the company I was with last year.  In the past
week while weeding through the spares and pulls, I've found boards from
machines I built two years ago that have gone bad.  Besides Soyo and
GigaByte, I've seen Asus, MSI, AOpen and Azza boards with the same
problem.  As an aside, I don't know whether PCChips was affected.  They
have always had too many problems of their own for bad caps to be of much
importance.



Scott Jones (scott at exti dot net)
Homepage   http://scott.exti.net
XFce desktop environment  http://www.xfce.org
Goodies for the XFce desktop http://xfce-goodies.berlios.de

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