Motherboard capacitor question

[Chaotic42]

I was looking at a capacitor today, and I was wondering if one could replace the capacitors on a motherboard (say 1500uF) for one with more capacitance (say 4000uF) and in doing so increase board stablility, assuming the other specs were the same.

Would that do any good at all? What about PSUs? Could someone replace the capacitors inside with multi-Farad capacitors in order to smooth the power output?

 

[LED]

I doubt if anything would change because it's part of 1 Formula

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Not going to do a damn thing

 

[Zepper]

Larger caps would pull more current during charge-up, perhaps overloading connectors or traces. And if you put a protective current limiting resistor ahead of the caps, you would slow down their response. It's all a balancing act...
.bh.

 

[Jeff7]

And, you'd need to get low-ESR (equivalent series resistance) capacitors anyway, which seem to be hard to find.
As for PSU's, I don't know - though you'd probably still want low-ESR caps there too. And if the rest of the PSU is cheaply made, a few expensive caps won't balance it out. (I got a response like that when I asked a question about upgrading a lousy PSU's capacitors.)

 

[Bozo Galora]

there was a huge thread on slashdot on this - basically the answer was - waste of time and effort