oblar

Out of curiousity, how many people here have had blown capacitors on a computer part?

Over the years I have yet to have any blown caps personally, but i have heard many horror stories. Well, now I have one of my own.

This afternoon I return from class and my computer is humming away just fine.. I take a nap, and wake up and bring up a web browser. Happily surfing away my computer locks. Kind of an annoyance, but it is a hard lock, I can't even switch virtual terminals and kill X. So, I turn off the machine and turn it back on. Well, my bios won't post. Hmm, that isn't good, but it has happened before and fixed with a simple reboot again. I reboot, still no post.. Hmm, now I know something is up, so I immediatley take off the case to read the Post code on the two 7-seg displays.

I read it is hanging on Checking Memory. Hmm, I wonder if my memory has fried. I switch it to another slot. Still nothing. I decide to clear the BIOS and try again, hoping on an off chance it will work. Still nothing. I decide to leave it alone for a bit. I come back and try it again, and I notice a new error code! Woot! 25... but what does 25 mean? I look it up... "Reserved"... that is helpful As I was piddling around with different things I look down and notice something odd about my capacitors.. Not really great lighting in here at the time, I am not positive.. Then I see another and my fears are confirmed. Here is what I had seen.

http://thieslo.no-ip.com/picts/Bad_Caps_1.jpg
http://thieslo.no-ip.com/picts/Bad_Caps_2.jpg

Yup, they were bad.. However, there is a good/bad side to this. The bad side, my computer's motherboard is fried and will require some work to return to working order.. The good side, those pictures turned out great!

Anyone else have any stories along these lines? I have had a friend who blew a capacitor on a video card, but just replaced it and worked fine for a long time.. Although I can replace the caps on my motherboard, I am a bit wary of it.. Not only were 5 bad, but I noticed a few more that might be swelling a bit much at the top, so I might need to replace several more, if not now, then soon.

skaven

I've definitely had capacitors (and power transistors) fry on many a computer component. As for the pictures you've posted, that's merely dust, my friend. A capacitor that has actually blown will show much more debris, as the "can" actually ruptures and throws electrolyte and foil around itself as it dies.

The most massive meltdown I've ever seen on a motherboard was on a Tyan Tiger MPX (S2466) 2P Athlon MP board. Both CPU fans had ceased functioning for quite a while, and the CPUs finally burned themselves up. The resulting failure was quite impressive: the dead CPUs shorted the power rails coming from the voltage regulators, which then proceeded to blow the power transistors. The CPU sockets melted due to the heat from the CPUs, and the power transistors got so hot that they literally desoldered themselves from the board. Two of the power transistors were lying on the video card when I opened up the system.

Now *THAT* is failing with gusto!!

oblar

as far as that being only dust, I wish it were the case, but no.. That is some of the inside goo from the capacitor.. Granted, it wasn't any explosion as it is only on the top, but they are blown in the way that they would all need to be replaced. Actually, after messing with it a bit more, I found a few more as well. The only bad part, is I think something may have occurred to my hard drive.. Tried to put it into another machine, by the time I got it to recognize, I did a ls and all I got were a bunch of ???'s... sooo... I guess I shall find out how bad things are once I get the replacement motherboard in..

although, I must say that your story there is definatley a massive failure something I would like to witness, but only when I am on just the witness end of things and not the victim *grin*. I have caught a ceased CPU fan on a couple of occassions, but I found them through either a) odd sounds coming from case (fan was hitting the heatsink and slowing down drastically), or b) dumb luck.

I would have loved to see your face when you opened up that case to find random parts loose inside *grin*

heyal256

Here is a good site for the people not familiar with the blown capacitor problem http://www.badcaps.com/

As to the question tho, I had a mobo just die on me about 2 months ago. I got lucky in that the bad caps just killed my agp slot (vid card that was in there is still working tho), so I was able to continue using my pc with a crappy pci video card that I had lying around.

skaven

Ah ok I took a second, closer look at the pictures and saw the broken foil and oozing electrolyte on top of the caps. Suppose that's what I get for making a post at 2:20am!!

As for the massive failure I described before, luckily I wasn't on the business end; it was a workstation that I was repairing at work. I have definitely seen some strange stuff before when fixing computers though.

Back at my first job at a computer repair shop a woman brought in an old 486 that she said she was trying to get working again. I took the computer into the back and plugged it in, and turned it on. PSU powered up, but nothing else. Another customer came in, so I went out front to talk to them, only to come back a couple seconds later and see, to my horror, that a perfect cylinder of black, acrid smoke was shooting out the back of the 486. I immediately turned the system off and after the smoke cleared, opened the chassis up. Apparently the woman had absolutely no clue what she was doing; she had hooked the 2-pin 5v lead from the PSU (the one that you used to have to plug in to the 7-seg display on the front of the chassis so it would display the CPU speed...remember those?) into one of front panel LED headers on the motherboard. I presume the doubled current fused some traces on the board, which caused the 5V rail in the PSU to go haywire. Every power cable in the box had gotten so hot that the insulation had caught fire, causing the smoke. Needless to say, I had to call the woman and tell her the system was toast.

Another great broken computer story was from the same shop; guy brings in a P3 that he says locks up all the time. First thing I assume is clogged heatsink or a bad fan, so I plug the system in, power it up, and it seems to be working fine. The heatsink stays cool to the touch, there's not much dust in it, the fan works, etc. Indeed, the system does lock up and occasionally power down at random times. After swapping out a few parts to no avail, I started to adjust some BIOS settings (clocking down the memory/CPU in particular). While in the BIOS I scrolled past the "Hardware Monitor" window and saw that the CPU was running at a toasty 195 degrees!! I immediately shut down the computer and checked the heatsink. Still warm (not hot) to the touch! I pop off the heatsink and had one of the best guffaws of my life. The plastic film covering the "goo" on the back of the heatsink was still attached! The CPU had melted into the plastic, fusing them permanently. Frankly I'm suprised the system ran at all! When I showed the guy his error, he laughed and said he "thought the plastic looked like it was supposed to come off, but left it on just in case". I sold him a new CPU and heatsink and sent him on his way.

shadowalker

blown them all when trying to hard mod stuff, so i have given up on the hardmodding and well saved myself lots of headaches.

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bendsley

i had bad caps on my abit motherboard.
was supposed to be used as a webserver, but, alas had to go with a little bit older board with dual-proc capabilities.

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JustDisGuy

Don't know for certain which parts 'blew', but I had a hard drive literally go up in a cloud of fuschia colored smoke once...

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fnaqzna

Same here... Abit KA-7 blew about eight caps one day. I replaced it with Asus.

oblar

skaven, you do indeed have some amusing stories

Just today while talking to my friend about my blown caps, he brought up something that I hadn't heard of before in regards to computers.

I used to work with him as a computer technician and the department we were in had several homebrew machines put together a few years back. Well, recently (in the last month or so) they have all died. He said he opened up the case and was surprised to find the inductor next to the AGP slot to have ruptured and left charred debris throughout the case. Every one of the machines had the same inductor gone.

it seems several of us here (who have replied) have had several capacitors blow all of a sudden. Does anyone know if it is that we suddenly have them blow or do a few blow and we dont notice it and by the time we notice it that several are goners? Just out of curiousity here.

JustDisguy, curious about the hard drive brand? I have had 3 hard drives die on me and 2 were western digital (had both replaced, and they werent so dead I couldnt recover my information), the other was a Maxtor. I refuse to buy maxtor anymore. The drive died with a mechanical failure somewhere. I rebooted my system and went from fine to hearing a loud clinking sound. I opened the case and immediatley found it was the hard drive. It was so bad it would try for a while to figure out what was there and give up. I never did recover any of the data on that drive.

Fuschia coloured smoke sounds interesting though

heyal256

The reason that all the capacitors seem to blow at the same time is because of the capcitors themselves. The large capcaitors are used for voltage regulation and when these go, I'm guessing that it causes a chain reaction.

This is a theory from various threads/stories about blown caps. I'm thinking that this is about as close to an explanation as anything else that you can come up with.

JustDisGuy

I can't be sure now - it was many years ago... though I think it was a Seagate drive. And yeah, it was bizarre, but to be honest I was a bit more concerned about my health because it went up pretty much in my face and I still don't know what the hell I was exposed to...

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