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A 'ticking' clock?

Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2004 3:02 am
by mrfixitx100
I just stumbled accross this:

http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview. ... erthread=y

VIA is being strangely quiet..................

Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2004 3:41 am
by mac_h8r1
If he isn't royally screwed, I don't know what could get any worse for him.

I'm stickying the thread so people can follow up on this problem.

Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2004 3:52 am
by SpotTheCat
oh jesus. Imagine you having 500 of them under your power, and you have to explain to the boss that 500 of his computers are going to explode at any moment, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2004 4:16 am
by Convert
100% failure rate


Uh yikes.... I can't wait to see how via handles this. Hopefully they do a mass recall.

Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2004 4:18 am
by Dirge
Ouch!

It would be very intereting to see VIA's response.

Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2004 8:19 am
by mrfixitx100
It would be very intereting to see VIA's response.

Well, the first post is dated Jun 28, the next post is dated Aug 16, it looks to me like a 'developing' problem...............
And as yet, no response from VIA, being the VIA forum maybe VIA is hoping it is going to go away?

Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2004 12:25 pm
by Starfalcon
Just another reason why I stay with Abit boards, problems like this make me thankful that they only use high quality rubycon caps. What amazes me is the fact that there are companies still using these caps even though they know they will fail.

Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2004 8:07 pm
by just brew it!
Yeah, that's what gets me about the whole capacitor debacle. While it seems that most of the boards with bad caps were made ~4 years ago, there are still ongoing problems with newer hardware as well. I had a ~1 year old Netgear firewall that died a few months back due to bad caps, for example. And Asus has recently had some problems with capacitors on the K8V Deluxe. WTF?!?? It's not like using quality capacitors is rocket science.

FWIW I just discovered some bulging caps on my FIC AD11 Socket A mobo last night. At least it is a somewhat older board that has seen some hard use (24x7 for about 2-1/2 years, and most of that under 100% load), but still... :evil:

Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2004 9:52 pm
by Convert
Sure enough...

Image

ARRG! This is from one of my GA-7VRXP rev. 1.0 boards. It had been acting real flaky as of late but I never expected it to be caps. After I read about this I thought I would take a look at some of my boards just to see what brand they were. The black cap next to those green ones is also a GSC (as you can see) along with 90% of the caps on this board but only the 2 green ones are experiencing this problem (there are only 2 green ones on the entire board). The taller caps on this board are choyo brand (4x).

I am going to be contacting gigabyte to see what they will do, they better not try to get around this or I will be very pissed.

Further searching I came across this article: http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003F ... 018535.htm

There are lots of gig users complaining of the same cap problem all from GSC.

The caps are GSC 105C 6.3V 1200uF Y10A. The ones not experiencing a problem are GSC 105C 25v (I imagine its supposed to be 2.5..) 300uF Y21C.

Thank you for posting this, if you hadn’t the board would have just ran till it died or got too flaky to continue using.

Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2004 10:51 pm
by just brew it!
Convert --

Yup... classic case of "exploding capacitor syndrome". When was the board purchased? I believe Gigabyte's warranty is 2 years.

Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2004 11:11 pm
by UberGerbil
It's only a matter of time before there's a class-action lawsuit over this. All it will take is one big company with a large number of machines all going south. I think the issue has mostly flown under the radar because the big OEMs have been handling it for their clients, and probably got wise to the problem and demanded only good caps for some time. Which left the mobo mfrs with only the DIY channel to dump the caps into. But sooner or later there's going to be a company that didn't buy from Dell or HP getting burned. Like the one in the link. And then it's going to get ugly.

Posted: Wed Aug 18, 2004 2:58 am
by rogelio
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview ... TMP=Linear

Read my post "rogelio"... my solution was to raise the DRAM voltage by .1.

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview ... TMP=Linear

Looks like there might be a link?
What do you think?

Posted: Wed Aug 18, 2004 3:07 am
by mac_h8r1
I don't think your problem is capacitor related, as such problems usually evolve over time [weeks and months]. If you're concerned, I'd take a look at the caps on the board right now, to see if there's a problem. Even better, take a picture of them now, whether they're good or bad, and then every few weeks. That way you can see if there's any change, and report it before it's too late.

Re: A 'ticking' clock?

Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 7:18 pm
by newmillenium
I'm surprised more companies don't just go over to solid capacitors. Are they saving enough money to make the coming lawsuits and replacement parts worth it?

Re: A 'ticking' clock?

Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 7:25 pm
by UberGerbil
Dude, did you check the dates on the comments you just replied to?