I've lost too many to count.

I have resurected quite a few too by replacing the caps myself. Thank goodness for solder wick!

Rob

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Most newer, higher quality boards use them and they really are a must for 27/7 crunching.

27/7 crunching? I've heard of overclocking, but this is ridiculous! ;)

Oops... ;-(

I must really need a vacation! I guess it just seems like my days are 27 hours long...sigh...

My Turion 64 X2 Laptop died. It had ~80,000 credit on Seti, ~20,000 credit on Climate prediction and ~10,000 Credit on Rosetta.

Apparently HP had a recall for the motherboards crapping out, but the recall warranty already expired. :(

Edit: Here is the link to the host: 4657813

I had a similar situation with an older pair of Toshiba Satellites. The backlight's inverter board was faulty and Toshiba extended the warranty by 5 years for only that one part, but since those two laptops were dumpster-dived, I didn't have a receipt to show when they were purchased, but I had missed the end of that 5-year extension by a matter of days when I found out about it.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

In 2004 my 3.00GHz HP Pavilion, running MB with standard apps 24/7, left a dark burn mark on my new Kathy Ireland brand desk. I imagined hearing Kathy Ireland's cute voice screaming in pain. She looked me in the eye and said "Bob, can you help me?" Then I rubbed lotion on her burn. Er, ah, I mean the burn on the desk was from the hot air exiting the side of the computer.

Soon after, the HP died. Warranty repair involved a replacement/upgrade to the CPU heatsink, plus the not so wonderful installation of some factory firmware or hardware that forced the HP to throttle down in relation to core temperature.

This proved the usual consumer-product limitations, where the system was designed for the typical user who rarely stresses the CPU.

Bob Mahoney

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Opinion stated as fact? Who, me?

Unfortunately I got no experience with notebooks, but I did have one board die on me recently.

It was a MSI KT600, wonderful stuff, it ran my XP2500+ at 2,5ghz 24/7/365 for over 4 years, then smoked (power section) in front of my eyes this Feb. just when I tried to push a lil more :)
Anyway, as a couple of you already mentioned, it would have failed eventually, so I don't mind, 3 caps were swelling for a good while, replacement didn't help, either because something else went wrong, or I've screwed some pathways close by in the process^^

Will see how those Japan made solid caps. do in a couple of years :)

hf folks~

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Yes, last year I blew up my Compaq Armada E500 laptop, age 8 years. I took it with me on a holiday trip through the States. Whenever we had power in the RV I would use it. After a few days it said during boot, battery is not being charged. PC ran fine, so what the heck. Keep crunching.
Then one bad day, the battery charging light came up, and the pc stayed dead. Problems. Big time. On the hard disk were about 1000 pictures my wife shot during the trip, pictures which were no longer on the card in the camera. If you know my wife, you know the amount of problems I was in.
After the holidays I started googling and I found out, in the laptop is a small power supply circuit board. This should cause the problems. I looked at the Compaq website and found a ridiculous price. I looked at Ebay and found the same board in England for a very low price, including shipment. I bought it, took the laptop apart, build in the board, put the laptop back together and ..... it was working again. As new. Pictures saved. Me saved.

My desktop is running 24/7 and with a normal cooler the temperatures stay constant, all the time. No problems here. And I overclocked the motherboard with 25%. My Q6600 is running at 3.0 GHz.

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DeMus

I began to crunch ~9 months ago. It was in Folding. I mainly crunch with GPUs and two GTX280 have already died (they have been crunching ~4 months each one before they died)

Did you overclock any of those 2 graphic cards?

I foolishly installed BOINC on my Sony VAIO FX201 laptop. The processor fan lasted nearly two months before it wore out and died. Sadly, that allowed the processor to cook.

But it did give me the excuse to replace a 700MHz Duron with a 1400MHz Athon.

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Can I change forum preferences?
Yes, and from home as well!

In 10 years of crunching I had only one cpu my q6600 became faulty in December 2008 causing the computer to get the dreaded BSOD. I overclocked it to 3.0. never burned out any motherboards but I never ran any thing more than a year or two due to upgrades in MB or CPU.

I've had 2 systems die because they weren't being used, and it took me a while to figure out what was going on.
The room they were in had poor ventilation. When i went on holidays (during our wet season) the high humidity combined with poor ventilation resulted in corrosion on the motherboards. As long as the systems were running the heat produced & the moving air from the fans kept them dry. Turn them off, and they corroded to death in less than a month.

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Grant
Darwin NT

I've had 2 systems die because they weren't being used, and it took me a while to figure out what was going on.
The room they were in had poor ventilation. When i went on holidays (during our wet season) the high humidity combined with poor ventilation resulted in corrosion on the motherboards. As long as the systems were running the heat produced & the moving air from the fans kept them dry. Turn them off, and they corroded to death in less than a month.

That is an very old story for me. When I was into TV servicing some 30 years ago, I always knew when some of my customers had returned from wintering in Florida. Almost every year I'd get a call to repair their TV.

I've been running seti optimized 24\7 for a year now with no problems i have an Acer 5620 laptop dual core with 3 gigs of memory.

I've had a T7200 laptop crunching nearly 24/7 for over a year now and have not had any problems with it. I run it using a Targus laptop chill pad that also comes with a nifty USB hub, and the chill pad seems to be effective in lowering the CPU temps a bit. It still runs at around 65 deg C according to CoreTemp, but this seems to be a typical load temperature for laptops.

Also the recent CPUs seem to be pretty good about turning themselves off in the face of a cooling problem, which is important since many laptops are relying on a single small fan that can possibly become blocked (especially when the intake is on the bottom) or fail. I have had the unfortunate experience of accidentally leaving the laptop on (BOINC running!) and placing it in a laptop bag but the system had shut itself down at some point. Yes the laptop got to a worrisome temperature when I pulled it out and would not allow itself to boot up until I waited several minutes for it to cool down (that was also a nerve-racking moment). I would not recommend testing out the thermal feature if you haven't seen it work but it is there just in case!

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same here, nearly year now, opt app 24/7, intel t 5500, and have no problems.

Hi,

Lots of good info about Bad Capasitors on this site - even repairkits to be bought:

BadCaps

I only have had one board that died. It was a classic "ABIT VP6 Dual P3" board which was born with bad capasitors. Lasted for 7 years with Seti 24/7 thou ;)

Regards
Kiva

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Greetings from Norway

Crunch3er & AK-V8 Inside

I began to crunch ~9 months ago. It was in Folding. I mainly crunch with GPUs and two GTX280 have already died (they have been crunching ~4 months each one before they died)

Did you overclock any of those 2 graphic cards?

Yes, 16% in clock and shaders (memory at stock rate). Now I don't do any OC in my GPUs.

as i remember the story, a capacitor company stole the electrolyte formula from another company but only got the first part of the formula. apparently they didn't get the recipe for the stabilizer!

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as i remember the story, a capacitor company stole the electrolyte formula from another company but only got the first part of the formula. apparently they didn't get the recipe for the stabilizer!

While a story like that is part of the problem, people mistakenly think that all capacitor failures are just from that situation. That is not true.

The more common chemistry electrolytic capacitors are not truly stable for long-life use at even moderately elevated temperatures at typical operation stresses.

If you raise the stress (think overclocking, 100% use, higher than original spec CPU...) it gets worse.

If you raise the temperature of the capacitor, it gets worse.

If you wait longer (long, steady use) it gets worse.

If you have the bad luck to have equipment with especially unstable materials (this is where incompletely copied formulation story figures in) it gets worse.

If the grade of capacitors designed into your equipment has unusually low spec margin to use condition, it gets worse.

Some serious audio guys I know say the first maintenance action to be taken pre-emptively on certain types of 25+ year old equipment (including crossover networks in loudspeakers) is simply to swap out the original electrolytic caps. These all predate the badly copied formula story.

As to the original question, you might notice that a large share of the factors I cite are made worse by the situation of a typical ambitious long-term SETI cruncher. We certainly are not alone in seeing this problem, but there are quite basic reasons to think we make it worse for ourselves.

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as i remember the story, a capacitor company stole the electrolyte formula from another company but only got the first part of the formula. apparently they didn't get the recipe for the stabilizer!

While a story like that is part of the problem, people mistakenly think that all capacitor failures are just from that situation. That is not true.

The more common chemistry electrolytic capacitors are not truly stable for long-life use at even moderately elevated temperatures at typical operation stresses.

All electrolytics have a rated life expectancy for given operating voltage & temperature. Raise either, and that life expectancy drops very significantly, very quickly.

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Grant
Darwin NT