It should be interesting to see how the "solid capacitors" hold up on newer boards.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the BP6/VP6 User Group today!

I do not disagree that other caps will start to age and fail. All electrolytic caps are destined to a certain amount of life. Just some have longer lives than others. I replaced the ones that were obviously a problem, and that resolved my issue, on both boards. I'm sure other caps will start bulging/oozing at some point, but until then, I'm not at all concerned.

I do know that I need a better iron. The one I'm using was my father's back in the early 80s, and still using the original tip that came with it. It's not anywhere close to being fine-point, which is excellent for tinning stranded copper wire, but awful for doing PCB work. One of these days I'll get a nice new iron and one of those big magnifying glasses with the fluorescent light built-in, but until then, I'm stuck with doing what I can with what I've got.

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

Read this thread with interest, and was wondering if anyone had a suggestion as to what is considered the "best" capacitor right now, money no object (within reason, no weird Mil spec stuff from Area 51, etc). I remember reading about Asus bragging about the new style caps that they were using which were supposed to be so much better than the previous style, not sure which type they were. Is there such a this as Best, or does it depend on it's intended application - MB, vid card, etc? Thanks for the enlightenment!

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Read this thread with interest, and was wondering if anyone had a suggestion as to what is considered the "best" capacitor right now, money no object (within reason, no weird Mil spec stuff from Area 51, etc). I remember reading about Asus bragging about the new style caps that they were using which were supposed to be so much better than the previous style, not sure which type they were. Is there such a this as Best, or does it depend on it's intended application - MB, vid card, etc? Thanks for the enlightenment!

The "Japanese Solid Capacitors" seems to be the latest "thing", but as far as long time reliability I don't know.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the BP6/VP6 User Group today!

Anyone ever have to replace capacitors?

Thousands of them.
Easily thousands.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Yeah I used to replace capacitors every year when I upgraded.....oh wait you mean to keep it running. ;)

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

The "Japanese Solid Capacitors" seems to be the latest "thing", but as far as long time reliability I don't know.

My board has this "Japanese Solid Capacitors" advertised with 50 000 hours lifetime. The board is running for two years now. Its Id say 90% of the day(24h) on. Thats about 15 700 hours. @24/7 it would be 5.7 years(if gigabyte were right).

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On an old slot1 board I was overclocking to the Nth degree. I had one of the electrolytics explode & shoot acidic paper all over the place. That was a fun mess to clean up... I ended up soldering wires to the remains of the cap leads and locating the new cap elsewhere.

ROFL, I love the eerie silence as you stare around at the feathery floaties. And the smell :P

I too have had to replace capacitors..........

Except in my case, they were in the speaker crossover networks in my hifi setup.
Was rocking out to some Deep Purple.....Space Truckin', I think. A bud of mine and I were tossing back brewskies and had it cranked up....these were 4 speaker cabinets driven by 2 Nakamichi PA7 200W/channel amps.....with a 3rd bridged to 400W mono driving an 18" JBL subwoofer.

When the organ solo in the middle of the song cut loose, everything held for about 10 seconds. Then several loud cracks, the midrange went out, and smoke and confetti puffed out of the ports on the speakers.

We looked at each other and laughed....way too cool.

LOL...the midrange crossover caps had blown up. I had upgraded the drivers in the speakers to handle the power, but the caps in the crossover found it impossible to handle. Had to rework them with nonpolarized caps at twice the original voltage, and they handled the abuse after that.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

The "Japanese Solid Capacitors" seems to be the latest "thing", but as far as long time reliability I don't know.

My board has this "Japanese Solid Capacitors" advertised with 50 000 hours lifetime. The board is running for two years now. Its Id say 90% of the day(24h) on. Thats about 15 700 hours. @24/7 it would be 5.7 years(if gigabyte were right).

I can't fault Gigabyte for their claim, either. My EP43 board is going on 3 years of running S@H 24/7/365 (since July 2008) except for cleaning, moving, or other "emergencies."

No signs that it is suffering at all from the abuse.

Martin

(of course, now that I've jinxed it, it will probably catch fire tonight! :) )

I can't fault Gigabyte for their claim, either. My EP43 board is going on 3 years of running S@H 24/7/365 (since July 2008) except for cleaning, moving, or other "emergencies."

No signs that it is suffering at all from the abuse.

Martin

(of course, now that I've jinxed it, it will probably catch fire tonight! :) )

I have the same experience, but I've still got a running Pentium 100 ~circa 1992 and it doesn't have solid state capacitors. Of course it hasn't been used in probably 8 years or more now but it lasted under normal usage and 24/7 crunching for years after it's desktop usage had been replaced in about 1999-2000 with an Athlon 1.3Ghz. Heck I was still using an FX-60 build(January 2006) when it was retired due to being replaced a few months ago. It crunched it's entire life span that I was using the computer and then non-stop as a server for years. And now my server has been replaced with my old e8400 and it has crunched for what 3-4 years now with nary a sign of capacitor issues.

I suppose it all boils down, like anything else, the MTBF times vary from part to part and is only an estimation. Some last 10 years some last a year.

Of course between machines I had various builds:
Pentium 100
Pentium 133
Athlon XP 1.3
Athlon 2800+
Athlon 4000+
Athlon FX-60
Intel e8400
Intel q9650

not too bad some builds happened a lot quicker than other but I've averaged about 2.4 years on each build. Each has been a really good machine. Whew I need to clean the closet out, between me and clients I got too much stuff from the last 10 years or so lol.

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

Solid state capacitors ftw.

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Read this thread with interest, and was wondering if anyone had a suggestion as to what is considered the "best" capacitor right now, money no object (within reason, no weird Mil spec stuff from Area 51, etc). I remember reading about Asus bragging about the new style caps that they were using which were supposed to be so much better than the previous style, not sure which type they were. Is there such a this as Best, or does it depend on it's intended application - MB, vid card, etc? Thanks for the enlightenment!

The "Japanese Solid Capacitors" seems to be the latest "thing", but as far as long time reliability I don't know.

Maybe you mean Sanyo OS-CON
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-CON

http://www.edc.sanyo.com/english/products/capacitor/oscon/outline.html

IIRC this type of capacitor was invented by/at Sanyo ~30 years ago but sadly become famous (in bigger use) only just now (for the last few years).


"An incorrect electrolyte formula within a faulty capacitor causes the production of hydrogen gas leading to bulging or deformation of the capacitor's case, and eventual venting of the electrolyte. ...
After some normal use the bad capacitors fail predictably far sooner than normal end-of-life;
Faulty capacitors have been discovered in motherboards as old as Socket 7 and have affected equipment manufactured up to at least 2007"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_capacitors

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- ALF - "Find out what you don't do well ..... then don't do it!" :)
 

Caps will go bad if a piece of equipment is left sitting around not in use and when the piece of equipment is started up for the first time again after being in storage it needs to charge up the caps to put life back in them if they can recharge. So if a piece of equipment is left in storage the best thing to do is to cut on its power every so often to keep the caps charged otherwise you might have issues and it might not be able to replace the caps because they no longer are made. I hade this happen to me with my oscilloscope and the caps had aged because I did not keep them charged and then I found I could not replace the caps because they were no longer available.

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Caps will go bad if a piece of equipment is left sitting around not in use and when the piece of equipment is started up for the first time again after being in storage it needs to charge up the caps to put life back in them if they can recharge. So if a piece of equipment is left in storage the best thing to do is to cut on its power every so often to keep the caps charged otherwise you might have issues and it might not be able to replace the caps because they no longer are made. I hade this happen to me with my oscilloscope and the caps had aged because I did not keep them charged and then I found I could not replace the caps because they were no longer available.

This is true (keep them charged/ON so the aluminum oxide layer recreates and do not dissolve) but only for "normal" (good) electrolyte capacitors, not the "bad" with incorrect electrolyte formula.

I wonder what is this strange type of electrolyte capacitors which "were no longer available"?
(if you own/use oscilloscope you are probably electronics professional and know how to find similar replacement parts)

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- ALF - "Find out what you don't do well ..... then don't do it!" :)
 

...I wonder what is this strange type of electrolyte capacitors which "were no longer available"?...

If it were there for high breakdown voltage purposes, it could have been several types such as vacuum tube type, or the banned PCB variety ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl ) Strange custom values would have also been possible prior to established of industry standard 'preferred values', and while the properties of some of the older types can be replicated with newer material based components, those aren't always easy to get either.

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"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

Excellent idea!

I can't take credit for that one. That's Class 3 military/aerospace rework training.

[zentraedi mode]Ah yes, Another military secret...[/zentraedi mode] ;)

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Caps will go bad if a piece of equipment is left sitting around not in use and when the piece of equipment is started up for the first time again after being in storage it needs to charge up the caps to put life back in them if they can recharge. So if a piece of equipment is left in storage the best thing to do is to cut on its power every so often to keep the caps charged otherwise you might have issues and it might not be able to replace the caps because they no longer are made. I hade this happen to me with my oscilloscope and the caps had aged because I did not keep them charged and then I found I could not replace the caps because they were no longer available.

This is true (keep them charged/ON so the aluminum oxide layer recreates and do not dissolve) but only for "normal" (good) electrolyte capacitors, not the "bad" with incorrect electrolyte formula.

I wonder what is this strange type of electrolyte capacitors which "were no longer available"?
(if you own/use oscilloscope you are probably electronics professional and know how to find similar replacement parts)

They were very high voltage oil caps and the oscilloscope is similar to a TV in that it had a CRT tube and if you are familiar with CRT's that have very high voltages that can kill a person so these caps were about 1500 volts oil caps and they are no longer manufactured and I could not find a replacements

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...I wonder what is this strange type of electrolyte capacitors which "were no longer available"?...

If it were there for high breakdown voltage purposes, it could have been several types such as vacuum tube type, or the banned PCB variety ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl ) Strange custom values would have also been possible prior to established of industry standard 'preferred values', and while the properties of some of the older types can be replicated with newer material based components, those aren't always easy to get either.

You said it right man!

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Just a real long shot, but you might try calling the folks at JE Capacitors.....

I believe these are the same folks previously known as JEA....Jaques Ebert and Associates.

Many years ago, they were very good at being able to supply rare and obsolete types. I don't know if they still deal with things that old or not, but they used to be very knowledgeable about older styles of caps.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Just a real long shot, but you might try calling the folks at JE Capacitors.....

I believe these are the same folks previously known as JEA....Jaques Ebert and Associates.

Many years ago, they were very good at being able to supply rare and obsolete types. I don't know if they still deal with things that old or not, but they used to be very knowledgeable about older styles of caps.

Its cheaper just to replace my old scope with a new digital one. all the parts are obsolete.

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