Thread: Blown caps on ASUS board

  1. #1
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    Blown caps on ASUS board

    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.

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    - - - - - - - - oogabooga's Avatar
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    The cost of software maintenance increases with the square of the programmer's creativity. - Robert D. Bliss

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    Master Apprentice phantomotap's Avatar
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    O_o

    I've scene this in a lot of kit, but I've never scene anything like that on a motherboard.

    The "It isn't our fault; a formula was stolen." thing sounds more like an excuse for low specification runs if you ask me.

    Soma

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    I've seen more computers behaving erratically as a result of hardware and driver incompatibilities more than as a result of capacitor failures. That could well explain why the problem went away after installing win7 - more recent versions of windows tend to be more reliable than older ones.

    In cases where capacitors were positively implicated in the instability, there was no visible indication (no bulging, no bottom bung popped out, no visible leakage of electrolyte, etc). The motherboard capacitors were only identified as a factor because a technician became curious one lunch hour, and found that the capacitors were functioning outside their specification. He also found that the power supplies were functioning out of spec, so there were multiple possible contributors.

    At work, my workgroup also had about a dozen desktop computers and some laptops from a certain large supplier suffer a rather noisy pop on startup due to capacitor failure (breakdown of the electrolyte can result in release of hydrogen gas). We simply replaced the machines under warranty.

    With care, you can purchase replacement capacitors and solder them onto a motherboard. This requires some skill, both in terms of picking/finding a suitable replacement capacitor, and in terms of soldering it on without affecting either the capacitor or other motherboard components. It's not hard to do but the cost of even a good quality motherboard often makes replacing capacitors sort of pointless.
    Last edited by grumpy; 09-15-2012 at 10:28 PM.
    Right 98% of the time, and don't care about the other 3%.

    If I seem grumpy or unhelpful in reply to you, or tell you you need to demonstrate more effort before you can expect help, it is likely you deserve it. Suck it up, Buttercup, and read this, this, and this before posting again.

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    Redundantly Redundant RoD's Avatar
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    You have an ASUS board and they are notorious for failure since circa 2004, the caps they use being no exception. Now you do not mention it so I have to ask, did you try to boot the PC using the original power supply?

    I would contact ASUS though in this case I feel you are somewhat to blame. You never should have built this system with a 400W PSU. You have been running with a less than adequate PSU for god knows how long (and you as well, but I don't know you didn't tell us) which is a danger zone for components and then you powered down the machine and installed a 850W PSU. I'm going to go out on a limb and say you did not relieve the stored power from the capacitors prior to installing and powering on with the new PSU either. That is a trick formed in the wake of a terrible motherboard intel used back in late 90's, early 00's called the 440BX (PIII). With the 440BX it would pop caps or short out when a new PSU was installed if the board had not been drained of power previous to the new PSU being booted with the system.

    Doubtful that it is a contributing factor here but the paranoid among us still make sure to discharge the system prior to installing a new PSU.

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    Failing caps near the CPU can most definitely and do in many cases cause system stability.

    They are used to filter voltage rails because CPUs draw a lot of current in very short spikes. Without those filters (or when they are not working properly), every spike would cause voltage to drop significantly, and that will cause the CPU (or any digital circuit) to do computations wrong.

    Low quality (or failing caps) have lower capacitance (capacity to "buffer") and more importantly higher equivalent series resistance.

    You can talk to the manufacturer to get it fixed, or if you are good with soldering iron, you can buy caps and fix it yourself, too, and upgrade to higher quality caps at the same time.

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    Redundantly Redundant RoD's Avatar
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    For the effort of buying the upgrading caps you could just spend the money on a better motherboard. Not like they cost much these days, no reason to upgrade on top of a junk platform when it should have worked to begin with.

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    Those caps cost about 50 cents each.

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    Redundantly Redundant RoD's Avatar
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    It's not about how much they cost. You guy a board, it is defective so not worth what you paid. Then you get caps, which you should not need to replace, and put in the time and effort to change them out. Possibly ruining the board in the process unless you know what you are doing. So now you either have a ruined board the company will not touch or you have a junk board you managed to repair for time and effort that you shouldn't need to invest and you always wonder what the next issue will be.

    Sorry, makes no sense. You can put sprinkles on poop but it is still just poop.

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    Lurking whiteflags's Avatar
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    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.
    The last board I bought has a giant plastic cover so I wouldn't know. Only after I buy it do I find out that those caps are what repair people look at first. I always thought mobos looked cool without the cover so I do have a bit of buyer's remorse. It came in a combo, basically, otherwise I wouldn't have bought the thing. The only definite problem it has is that the sound card makes headphones sound like they're underwater, so I can't use the case to connect my headphones. Big deal.
    Last edited by whiteflags; 09-17-2012 at 06:41 AM.

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    Redundantly Redundant RoD's Avatar
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    Generally speaking combos are often a bad deal if you buy them looking for a deal. You can save a few bucks on a combo over buying separate but you have to make sure it is quality. I have had good experience with combos using motherboards from MSI and Gigabyte. In fact Gigabyte is actually my go to motherboard, especially for water based systems.

  12. #12
    Unregistered User Yarin's Avatar
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    I've also had to learn the hard way that ASUS MBs are crap.

  13. #13
    Redundantly Redundant RoD's Avatar
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    Didn't used to be that way, sad changes in time

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    It's not about how much they cost. You guy a board, it is defective so not worth what you paid. Then you get caps, which you should not need to replace, and put in the time and effort to change them out. Possibly ruining the board in the process unless you know what you are doing. So now you either have a ruined board the company will not touch or you have a junk board you managed to repair for time and effort that you shouldn't need to invest and you always wonder what the next issue will be.
    That's an interesting viewpoint. The way I see it, the company's contract to you is they will sell you a product that is working at that time, and guarantee that it will work at least till the end of the warranty period. Assuming this is after the warranty expires, the company's obligation is done already. Things do break out of warranty period. It sucks, but there's not much you can do about it. Electronics do age and fail, just like cars. If you have a car that breaks out of warranty period, do you just say that's crap and throw it away and buy a new one?

    It's like a 20 years old TV that stopped working. If you know you can fix it with $3 worth of components, and you don't need a big and fancy TV yet, do you try to fix it? Or throw it away and buy a new one? I would definitely fix it, but maybe that's because I'm an engineer.

  15. #15
    Redundantly Redundant RoD's Avatar
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    If the motherboard is out of warranty then it is outdated and isn't worth the energy investment for that reason. Either way the effort seems wasted. After a warranty period another motherboard to drop in there could be had really cheap.

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