Leaked cap

[lsman]

Yestersday I do a silly thing and kill my mb and 1700+.
While checking the mb outside of the case, I see 4-5 Caps near the DDR slot are pop up on top. and 2 actually are leaked at bottom and the chemical all on the mb.

Surprise its running before I kill them, may be I am late for those leaking cap (Abit and Epox has their share of problem) and finally got one.

Question why all around that area next to Ram (not the edge side where CPU was) when the same cap was all over the mb do not have such problem? heat spot?

 

[stevennoland]

Who knows. Quality control on those items must have been in the toilet. Dump that mobo and get a new one.

 

[lsman]

Its a MSI OEM nforce1 flex-ATX mb in my MOD case. Sad it gone now.

 

[Googer]

RMA if it is possible and get a new one. I do remember some motherboard manufacturers a few years ago decided to use cheap capicitors and later had to issue massive recalls due to them leaking and spilling. You just might have one of those boards.

That is the reason now ABIT and others are touting Japaneese Capacitors. Because of the mishap 2years ago.

 

[Peter]

Two factors here: A few years ago, a lot of capacitors in the budget arena were made using counterfeit material (from a stolen, incomplete formula). The material isn't long term stable, gasses out and pops the capacitors. Dark green capacitors w/ golden print on them are particularly suspicious.

The other factor is heat, accelerating capacitor death particularly around the CPU. Mostly seen in poorly ventilated cases.

 

[Googer]

Thanks for the reminder.

 

[Boobers]

Peter is exactly right.

My Epox 8RDA+ was a top OC'er, running @ 2.5Ghz (12.5x200). After a year I took that board out of the well ventilated tower case (28c) and put it in a desk-top case with marginal cooling (32c). After a month it started freezing and then refused to boot (MB showed post codes C1, C0 & FF randomly). I examined the board to find three puffed-up caps near the large coil by the end of the RAM slots, with one leaking a light brown substance out the top. It seems the slight increase in temp had pushed the caps over the edge. No wonder it had been flakey!

The caps were dark green with gold printing, marked "GSC". They were 1000uF and 1500 uF caps.

Epox has a useless 2 year warranty. They want me to pay to ship the bad board to them (OK, I can go along with that), BUT they want me to also pay $15 return shipping. What a rip off. That's like paying around $25 to get the board RMA'd! Then, to top it all off, they replace the GSC caps with...guess what...THE SAME GSC CAPS. I've seen posts from people who have RMA'd their boards multiple times, only to have the same problem months down the line.

I suggest you (or someone you know who can solder) replace the caps. Check out some posts at www.badcaps.net/forum to find out how... I'm in the process of replacing the caps myself right now. And I'm going to replace all the caps 1000uF and above (24 caps total). Hopefully it'll be an OC'in beast once again.