My wife's system has been randomly shutting down over the last few months. This is fairly standard behavior for a bad PSU. She has a 400W in it but probably not enough to power an AGP, SATA 3 fans, 2 cards and the mobo. So I purchased a 850W PSU today and install and the board refuses to POST. I had her shut the system down prior to installing the PSU so it did work prior to install. However, this board has done this to me before so it isn't anything new.
After close inspection of the motherboard I noticed 3 capacitors near the CPU socket that are bulging at the top. They are not leaking nor show signs of catastrophic failure but they are domed. Well after some research it seems that domed capacitors are failed capacitors and can cause the exact kind of behavior we have been seeing.
Now I am a little nervous b/c my brand new system last year was having similar issues but after installing W7 it has never suffered a pre-mature shutdown.
Needless to say I will be inspecting the caps on my quad core system in the near future.
Anyone else experience bad caps on their mobos? Apparently there was a bit of industrial espionage and a stolen electrolyte formula (or part of one) that resulted in a huge number of bad Tawainese-manufactured caps being produced and sold. It seems to have affected companies like Apple, Samsung, ASUS, ABit, Dell, etc.
