Motherboard of doom

[ssurgul]

Well.

Since I swapped over all the hardware to my backup motherboard, I've been able to take a long hard look at the 'good' one. Huh. Do you think little blobs on capacitors indicate component death? I sorta vaguely recall something like that being bandied about in one of my CS courses ages ago in school. :)

Comments

Dead electrolytic fluid, looks like.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Or rather, it's ability to be contained within the capacitor failed, causing a loss of pressure, and thereby, a drastically changed capacitance, further drying out the material inside the capacitor, making the remaining fluid be cooked inside rather than be expelled at a certain point.

Might want to look around if your motherboard was one of the ones subject to illegal capacitors. Or rather, a company got a formula for a new electrolyte that was vastly cheaper to produce via industrial espionage a few years back, because they got the incomplete, 'beta' formula.

And yup, they tend to blow after several years, about like that. The motherboard is actually perfectly fine, if you find someone that has soldering gear safe to use on multi-layer circuit boards, and that doesn't mind spending a buck or so on fresh, high-end capacitors.

There's actually people that'll buy that 'dead' motherboard from you on EBay or similair, replace the capacitors on the entire board with new ones, and resell it for around the cost of that motherboard brand new when it first came out, because the capacitors are 99% of the 'failed components' on motherboards today. Replace those with ultra-high-quality components, suddenly the entire board becomes much more stable and worth the price.