FX-8350 $220

[clone]

To be fair, even respected brands like Asus, Abit, and MSI had significant problems with exploding capacitors back in the day. It wasn't *just* the cut-rate second and third tier vendors.

absolutely, everybody had their bad series, I got burned by Abit a company I had grown to depend on during the P3/P4 transition and had to walk away, Asus, Gigabyte and MSI all disappointed at one time or another but the worst offenders by far were ECS, Soltek and the early days of Asrock, I've never given Asrock a 5th chance so I can't comment on their product today.

I had one Asrock board's capacitors that worked with the integrated graphics start swelling and puking and the owner was desperate to keep the board alive "just for now, seriously I can't go without it right now" so I popped in a used Radeon 7000 32mb video card and it booted so I handed it back, it took another 10 months for the rest of the caps to bloat and fail.

[just brew it!]

Yup, I refuse to toss a piece of hardware just because a cap exploded. So I got pretty good at recapping motherboards, video cards, network switches, etc. with my crusty old Radio Shack soldering iron!

[flip-mode]

Yup, I refuse to toss a piece of hardware just because a cap exploded. So I got pretty good at recapping motherboards, video cards, network switches, etc. with my crusty old Radio Shack soldering iron!

I've tried it. I'm not any good at it. I've got some Dell mobos around here that are the bones of great little Core 2 Duo E6600 computers than have rotten caps on them and I just can't seem to successfully replace the caps. Better to use the machine till it stops functioning than assuredly kill it trying to fix it

[just brew it!]

Once it dies you've got nothing to lose. The caps don't *usually* take anything else with them when they go (though they do occasionally blow a MOSFET, in which case there's not much point in trying to fix it).

[clone]

Once it dies you've got nothing to lose. The caps don't *usually* take anything else with them when they go (though they do occasionally blow a MOSFET, in which case there's not much point in trying to fix it).

I did it briefly as an experiment but then they came out with the hi temp solder which made it more time consuming while at the same time computer prices plummeted causing used system values to collapse.... at the time we were making far more money off used comps than new ones using the trade ins for profit, the change really took the fun out of it for a cppl years as we adjusted to the new reality.

if it was my personal system I'd be game for it but it was used systems coming in that were 1 or 2 years old, a replacement board was $45.99 ..... just no money in it, Soltek even sent me three capacitor kits to fix their Golden Dragon boards that failed but by the time the parts showed the customers had already moved into a new systems.

never had one blow a mosfet but that was just luck I'm sure.

friend of mind did mount a cap backwards... assume he was tired, regardless that was entertaining and another pulled an active ps2 plug on his board which caused a huge blue spark/crack and then the nearest cap melted away.... was hilarious.