Hello, I have had two motherboards in a row that have bad capacitors, domed and leaking. One was on a Gateway so I thought, well it's a Gateway. But the other is a Gigabyte. Same caps on both boards, 1500mf 10v 105c green with gold stripe. Do you think there was a bad batch of these caps or is this just a low-end motherboard issue? Thanks,
-Mac
Where have you been the last few years? This has been a well documented and posted problem for the last several years. Some China knock off firm made some very large batched of watered down electrolyte and sold it to capacitor manufactures all over the Asian rim. As a result capacitors have been failing prematurely for some time.
Google for lots of really good information on bad capacitors.
Great site here with lots of info
Well, I'm kinda new to motherboard repair. Thanks for the link.
Mac -
This problem even made it to the IEEE publication in 2002. I fixed my nephews bad HP computer ... replaced about 15 of these bad capacitors on that 4-layer ABIT motherboard (I have a Pace desoldering system - s the proper tools were at hand for this operation). BTW, GOOD replacement capacitors (I used Panasonics) are not cheap (thanks to this mess).
gb ==== History:
How did this happen? The reason this problem exists is because of a large-scale industrial espionage (e.g. let's steal the secrets instead of paying the license) foul-up. Some companies decided to steal an electrolyte formula from another competitor. Little be known to them, the stolen formula was incomplete and flawed. They didn't discover this until it was too late and they had manufactured and distributed literally MILLIONS of these flawed capacitors. It was way too late for any kind of recall, and even today, these crappy components are being used in new motherboards!! I These go into extreme detail on the actual espionage ring and how this came about. This was the modern-day Rosenberg incident of industry... The cause... This inferior and flawed electrolyte formula was used by a number of component manufacturers that sold to many different, reputable, and well known motherboard manufacturers. This problem isn't isolated to one particular brand of motherboard, and not even isolated to motherboards alone. I won't mention brands, but a VERY popular monitor manufacturer has been plagued with RMA's on some of their monitors that were built using these inferior capacitors. This problem has been reported in computer motherboards, monitors, televisions, radios, and stereo equipment.
It's not just motherboards, I ran into those caps on all manner of things.
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