How long do you think these capcitors will last?

Jun 8, 2013
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This is quite an old PC relatively, it is running a Phenom 8550 to give you an idea of its age. It works perfectly fine, however some of the capacitors are staring to look like they are bulging at the top. The PC does spend a large part of the day turned on, although a lot of that time will be just idling.

The room the PC is in gets very hot this time of year when it is sunny in the afternoon, 24c minimum if I am lucky. I can just about afford to replace it with a new build, however I would rather wait. My concern is with the additional heat at this time of year the capacitors will finally give up very shortly.

Should I try and wait a bit longer or replace it now?

The photos are not the best.

http://s1226.photobucket.com/user/blobsaudio/library/caps
 

Zap

Elite Member
Oct 13, 1999
22,377
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This cap is the only one out of all your photos that looks to me as if it may be bulging. I'm talking about the green/gold one with the + on top. Kind of hard to tell though. Can you get a more angled pic instead of one that is almost straight down?


I've had a socket 478 motherboard in a home server last a few years with bulging caps until finally it wouldn't boot up anymore. It would run for months on end until some long term power outage or some software update required a shutdown or reboot. Was perfectly stable for file and printer serving (very little load) even with bulging caps.

A friend of mine had a socket A rig with bulging caps that would cause onboard stuff (NIC, sound, USB) to not work, so he had to have PCI cards for that functionality. Otherwise his rig ran just fine.

I think it is difficult to predict how long your system will work with the bulging cap (if it is indeed bulging) because that would depend on the purpose of that cap (near the RAM?) and how much overhead/tolerance the board was designed to have for power characteristics.
 
Jun 8, 2013
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Having just tried to take a better picture by moving the PC, putting it on its side and moving the cables out of the way I noticed something. All the green and gold caps look slightly bulging compared to the black ones due to the lines being deeper on them, especially when you look at it from the side like I have been doing. Damm optical illusion.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,571
10,206
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If you do decide to upgrade, post a thread in General Hardware. We'll take care of you.

(I'm partial to B75 boards with solid caps, and IB Celeron G1610 CPUs, for a cheap upgrade.)