What Happened to the Capacitors in 2002?

[FoulOnWhite]

interesting video about the swollen cap scandal? I haven't seen this before so i certainly learned some stuff i did not know

 

[Dr. Dro]

Was recommended and watched this some time ago. Pretty good video on the subject. My personal experience is that it seems pretty much everything that's electrolytic from the 2000's (up until 2008 or so) invariably fails prematurely, even if well taken care of. My brother has an Xbox 360 he got in 2008, one of the earlier revision Jasper boards (which have a native HDMI out), helped him open it to clean the other day as it was quite loud and the console hadn't been used in a few years... pretty much every single electrolytic on the board had stuffed up, one even opened at the top. No clue how the console was still working, spent the afternoon recapping it with him. I'm glad Sony opted for all solid-state caps on the PS2 and PS3 right from the first revision.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

This paid for a lot of my overtime a decade ago, swapping motherboard after motherboard. It was a never ending job.

 

[Steevo]

I remember the exploding power supplies, the random errors from caps on motherboards. Some wouldn't last a year.

 

[droopyRO]

I can't remember what hardware i had back then, an AMD platform for sure, probably Duron. But i dodged this problem, also i don't remember a friend having issues with hardware related to bad caps.

PS: also Asianometry is a great YT channel, i have been watching him for about a year, and have yet to find a boring video.

 

[Scattergrunt]

This is definitely farr before my time but I will give it a watch. I'm old in spirit, maybe even in mentality and feeling too (are my bones supposed to be popping already?) but I'm still certainly young enough..

Was recommended and watched this some time ago. Pretty good video on the subject. My personal experience is that it seems pretty much everything that's electrolytic from the 2000's (up until 2008 or so) invariably fails prematurely, even if well taken care of.

Ehh.. it depends, there's some outliers. Most of the cheaper built ones, for sure. I've come across my fair share of dead electronics from that era and I guess this could correlate to that.

The only real outliers are ones like you mentioned, such as the PS2 and PS3. The PS2 is a absolute beast of a console that I still find looking almost new to this day. Same with PS3's.

My brother has an Xbox 360 he got in 2008, one of the earlier revision Jasper boards (which have a native HDMI out), helped him open it to clean the other day as it was quite loud and the console hadn't been used in a few years... pretty much every single electrolytic on the board had stuffed up, one even opened at the top. No clue how the console was still working, spent the afternoon recapping it with him. I'm glad Sony opted for all solid-state caps on the PS2 and PS3 right from the first revision.

I mean the XBOX 360's first couple versions had a ton of problems. But I don't remember swollen caps being part of it iirc. Mostly just bad ventilation of very hot electronics stuffed up in a tiny chassis, which lead to the consoles overtime cooking themselves and causing the infamous "Red Ring of Death" (PS3 had its own version of things too, yellow light of death or something, but it was not for the same reasons, and it was a MUCH better built console at the cost of being overpriced to hell.)

My old XBOX 360 which was one of the earliest revisions (don't remember which, I should really check) is still working perfectly fine but I don't turn it on very often. Been cleaning it out here and there though and making sure it has ventilation though, Incase I ever need to access it again such as for recompiling games through XenonRecomp (considering that is new, and I'm sure more people are gonna try recompiling XBOX 360 games now that we've proven its possible w/ Sonic Unleashed.)

 

[Princess Garnet]

I don't even need to watch the video, haha. "I've seen this one before". And I don't mean the video. I had a Dell OptiPlex GX 270 for a while, which was infamous for capacitor issues and that was how I found out about this in real time, so to speak. I can't remember what exactly led me to finding out about it, but I was probably looking up some other issue I was having and came across the thread on badcaps.net back when it was ongoing.

I eventually checked mine and found that the row of capacitors between the CPU and rear I/O of the motherboard had a couple that looked like they might be bulging a little bit. The rest looked okay.

Oddly, the PC worked fine... as far as I know. I generally had a lot of instability/software issues in those days though, but I don't know how many I can attribute to that particular cause.

The one odd behavior of that PC that I do remember was that the BIOS settings would clear if the power cable was ever removed. Generally, that happens if the battery is dead and not saving the settings, but it happened with a number of known, good batteries too. I never figured that one out but I suppose it wasn't a major problem in itself, but I did wonder if the capacitors could have something to do with it. As far as I know, that PC otherwise worked fine up until the point I built my first one (2007/2008) and gave it to a friend for her to give it to one of her other friends that i didn't know well (she wanted to play Sims 2). I know she used fine it for a while but for how long, and if any issues arose later, I don't know.

 

[_roman_]

I saw this in the 1980ies.

There is more to capacitors than this. Like with dead fuses I hardly remember having such "blown" capacitors.
I do not own special measurement devices for capacitors. If in doubt - replace em. I'm not talking about a truerms multimeter