In article ,
75475,451 wrote:

This may be old news to many of you.

In considering a new motherboard, I remembered an article I stumbled
upon a few days ago talking about bad capacitors in motherboards
manufactured in the last two years. I just Googled the topic and found
some scary information. I have built three computers since 2002. One
with a Tyan Trinity 510, and two others with socket A, KT266a and KT333a
chipset, MSI motherboards. One was for a guy I worked with last summer.
He says it still runs fine. Hope it continues to run fine.

Anyway, the impression I got from the articles and postings I read was
that even highly regarded motherboard manufacturers fell into this
problem of using faulty caps. I won't name any of them, I'll leave that
to Google. But I will name one that claims to have avoided the faulty
capacitor issue, by insuring that they used the best capacitors made in
Japan, Albatron. I would never have thought. I saw how cheap they where
while searching on Pricewatch (I never really heard of Albatron until
I searched Pricewatch), and automaticaly considered them a stability
risk. I may take another look at what they have to offer.

Also in my reading, Intel was not mentioned as a manufacturer that may
have used faulty capacitors.

Is this a non-issue with recent dual channel Pentium boards, and
Athlon64/FX boards?

Ed


ISTR it was one bad batch of parts from a company using materials they
may have known were bogus. One way or another, the mobo assembly lines
found a source of good parts quickly.

The inventory pipline from the parts manufacturers to the board
manufacturers, to the dealer is very lean these days. Nobody keeps
warehouses full of stuff anymore. The bad boards were flushed long
ago. The machines you built more than a year ago may be at risk, but I
wouldn't worry about capacitors in stuff you buy today. And remember,
only a percentage of the boards made with these capacitors acutually
fails.

Today's news is that the motherboards in some Dell servers sold last
fall may catch fire. It's not the last problem that bites, it's the
one you haven't found yet (or hasn't found you.)




--
Al Dykes
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