My computer has been a bit unsteady lately. Sometimes it refuses to turn on. Other times it will just reboot itself. Finally last night around midnight I decided to get to the bottom of the situation. I poked and prodded around for a while, unplugging one item or another, resetting the CMOS, etc. After a few hours of no luck, I decided that I better pull it out of the case entirely and make sure that I wasn't having some sort of problems with it grounding out. As I studied the motherboard I realized that many of the capacitors did not look right. On closer inspection I saw that some actually had ruptured and leaked their fluid! It was then that I remembered the big scandal that was going on a few years ago over capacitors. Apparently some fellow in Japan stole the formula to the electrolyte they use in capacitors, and took it to a company in Taiwan. He got the formula wrong however, and all of these cheap capacitors made using it are prone to blowing up. Becaues of this a good deal of the motherboards manufactured between 1999 and 2001 have these faulty capacitors. By this time it was about 4:30 A.M. so I went to bed.
Anyway, after reading dozens of reviews, I've decided to get an ASUS A7V600 for my next motherboard. Sure the KT600 chipset isn't quite so snazzy fast as the dual channel nForce2 Ultra 400, but the reviews say that this board is stable, and stable is what I want. Plus, with built in SATA RAID and Gigabit LAN, it is plenty cool. It also has NO ON BOARD FAN one of my major criterian in choosing a motherboard.
Check out the pics above to see the blown capacitors.
No comments:
Post a Comment