Asus nForce220 v. Abit nForce420 v. MSI KM266 -- mATX decision

[KF]

>I have 5 dead Abit mobos because of the crappy caps they have on the boards.

GeofS,

What happens to the caps?

 

[GeoffS]

They bulge and/or leak yukky brown or black goop that I'm sure can't be good for me. Mostly the ones near the CPU slot/socket. Symptoms leading up to this discovery include erratic behaviour at stock voltage and fsb, then and unending, alternating high/low tone like a siren while booting up and not posting. There is a guy named Homie in the Abit newsgroup how will replace caps for out of warranty mobos for a pretty reasonable fee. He replace is 10,000th cap recently. Gotta figure that, with a number like that, the problem isn't isolated to how I abuse... err... use Abit mobos

Geoff

 

[duuuma]

Originally posted by: GeoffS
They bulge and/or leak yukky brown or black goop that I'm sure can't be good for me. Mostly the ones near the CPU slot/socket. Symptoms leading up to this discovery include erratic behaviour at stock voltage and fsb, then and unending, alternating high/low tone like a siren while booting up and not posting.

EXACTLY the same problem I had with Abit, and that's why I'll never buy an Abit again. I had an Abit 440BX board + P3 that was running fine for about a year when one day, when I turned it on it just started beeping w/o POST. There was no mention of beep codes in the manual, and after finding out about the trend of leaky capacitors, I found the same problem on mine.

I've tried MSI, ASUS, EPox, and Shuttle since then to build systems and have had no problems.

 

[KF]

>10,000th cap

That's scarey. All ABIT? There does not seem to be any great reason at the current time to buy an ABIT board anyway. Not when there is the EPOX 8K5A3. I have have owned a few ABITs. My current main system is an old ABIT KT7, a phenomenally popular mobo for a while. They used to say this mobo was finicky about power supplies. I wonder if it really was a problem with leaky caps that some power supplies couldn't handle and others could. All electrolytic capacitors leak (electrically) somewhat; if they leak too much, they heat up a lot, and can blow up. They are in cans because there is trace of liquid in them. The way they make these capacitors initially is to run a huge current through them to form the insulator (dielectric). It is because the insulator is so thin when you form it this way that makes it possible to have tiny capacitors with large capacitances.