swollen capicitators----cause glitches?

**stant093** · March 15th, 2004, 07:40 PM

i just picked up DFI CS65-EC rev A mobo with a 800mhz P3 on it, for cheap, its reported to be glitchy....dont exactly knwo what it was, but it was cheap enough to pick up regardless......

upon opening the box and glancing over the board, i notice 8 or 9 swollen capicitators on the board, not quite popped but getting there.....would this affect performance? i ask because i had a epox board with blown capicitators, and the thing worked excellent, no problems at all, i only found them cleaning the heatsink and fan.........

what do you guys think?

**jmichna** · March 15th, 2004, 10:48 PM

Swollen capacitors = mobo --> landfill
Sorry for your loss...

If one or two, you might take a stab at replacing, but all nine.... would take a LOT of patience and time.

**EvilRick** · March 15th, 2004, 10:51 PM

I've noticed sporatic reboots, non-Power Ups, and no video with swollen caps. Your luck may vary.

**howste** · March 15th, 2004, 10:55 PM

My experiences with swollen capacitors on mobos have never been good. Usually they end up in the trash before too long.

I'm not sure about capacitators though...

**jmichna** · March 15th, 2004, 11:16 PM

Originally posted by howste
...I'm not sure about capacitators though...

Bad 'capacitators' = 'garbabage'

**John Prophet** · March 15th, 2004, 11:40 PM

well bad caps allow the power supply to put out "dirty" voltage..so anything could happen..especially with the higher powered cpu's because they draw more power

we worked on a comp and it ran fine with a slow celeron but it wouldnt boot with a faster p3....so it seems the p3 drew more power and pushed the strained voltage over the edge.

Then again, I have seen a board work fine with swollen caps

JP

**Bovon** · March 16th, 2004, 04:52 PM

Originally posted by John Prophet
well bad caps allow the power supply to put out "dirty" voltage..so anything could happen..especially with the higher powered cpu's because they draw more power

Although powersupplies do have capacitors that go bad, stant093 is referring to the caps on the motherboard near the CPU socket. These caps deal with the 2 or 3 phase Vcore voltage...and are among the bad capacitors the motherboard manufacturers bought trainloads of a couple or 3 years ago

Then again, I have seen a board work fine with swollen caps

JP

A capacitor works like this. It will pass AC voltage but block DC voltage. 90% of the usage of the tubular type capacitor is filtering..in which it is placed in a DC circuit to filter to ground any AC hum or component that escapes the filtering of the Power Supply. It does not "pass" much voltage to ground...and it never heats up..which it would, if much AC were present. Heating a tubular capacitor causes it to swell up, and most times short internally...which then will pass any voltage to ground, AC or DC..this will kill the circuit that the capacitor is installed in, and thereby...kill the operation of the board or device.

Internally, the tubular capacitor is fabricated with two metal plates (metal impregnated gel in the smaller units of today..but used to be two metal foils separated by an insulator..similar to plastic-wrap). This allows AC to pass thru and the DC to stop and not pass thru.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY...eb03/ncap.html

http://home.earthlink.net/~doniteli/index27.htm