6 ms·

It wasn't just Dell, every manufacturer had bad caps in those years. MSI, ASUS, you name it. They all bought those cheap knock-off capacitors for their boards

It wasn't just Dell, every manufacturer had bad caps in those years. MSI, ASUS, you name it. They all bought those cheap knock-off capacitors for their boards. They lasted about 6000 hours - we could set it in a calendar and did so many RMAs. For the local 911 center, we'd replace the boards every 4 months, before the caps failed, because they just couldn't tolerate the downtime.

metadat 4y ago
What was the fate of the old, not-yet-dead motherboards?
- savoytruffle 4y ago
  They were dead. Recycled or landfilled. Hopefully the former. The goop leaks out and ruins the board anyway.
  - metadat 4y ago
    I was trying to ask about the fate of the discarded but still working hardware. 4 months is 2920 hours, which is less than the stated 6000 hours to failure. Though only by 2x.
MBCook 4y ago
Yep. I remember my Asus VP6 dying of the dreaded capacitor plague.
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
Back in these days I worked at a small electronics shop run by an electrical engineer. People would come in saying their PC didn't work. He would pop it open, take out the motherboard, go "ah yes, puffy caps. See right there", then open a drawer full of recycled capacitors, and desolder the bad ones and resolder correct ones back on. And it worked! The shop ultimately closed but I still think back to that and a few other tricks as especially impressive.
- notatoad 4y ago
  >the shop ultimately closed yeah, sounds about right. i was also working in a repair shop around the same time, and we knew that we could repair the boards for our customers. but we also knew that we couldn't get away with charging enough to cover the cost of parts and labour unless we offered a warranty, and we couldn't reasonably offer a warranty on old motherboards. we did make pretty good money selling upgraded new computers to the people whose capacitors had failed. it always felt a bit dirty to sell somebody a new $800 laptop when their old computer was repairable, and i'm sure dell was doing even better than we were on that racket.
  - danuker 4y ago
    Profit could not be there without value provided. The fact that you "get away with it" is only possible if you offer such a needed service, that people are willing to pay. If you want to be charitable, leave some money on the table for customers who look in dire straits. But you should not feel bad for making a profit (at least until you find yourself buying politicians).
  - digitallyfree 4y ago
    I do board-level repairs on my own stuff (most recently replaced a shorted IC on a laptop motherboard) as it saves them from landfill and is an interesting debugging exercise. It can take a lot of time and effort and complex repairs may not be worth it due to the chance for failure (I've destroyed PCB traces and chips) as well as the fact that some parts simply aren't cost-effective to replace. In the laptop example the many evenings spent reading datasheets and probing circuits definitely cost more than a replacement unit if I billed the hours per my engineer's salary. When I was a student friends and relatives would give me (nice) broken electronics that they were going to throw out anyways, and if I liked the item (e.g. an expensive camera that I couldn't afford) I would put a lot of effort into fixing it.
  - Sakos 4y ago
    I'm close with one of the last repair shops I know of in Germany that still does it. There still seems to be a market for it, but definitely not enough to keep an industry alive. > but we also knew that we couldn't get away with charging enough to cover the cost of parts and labour unless we offered a warranty I'm not sure about that. The store charges more than enough to cover it and still gets more business than it can handle while still providing a free warranty for 6-12 months.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
anyfoo 4y ago
Because of that drama, I remember some people (maybe me included, not sure anymore) actually thinking that electrolytic caps just generally had a pretty bad lifetime, and the need for replacement was just reality for products that were expected to last for more than an unreasonably short lifetime. Only later did I learn that it actually seemed to have been industrial espionage gone wrong! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague That's probably also the reason why so many retro enthusiasts just generally "re-cap" almost everything they touch. In a lot of cases, you just don't need to do that, and sometimes it could be worse to replace capacitors not affected by the capacitor plague: Any factory adjustments made to the device could well depend on the exact characteristics of the capacitors that were present in the device when it was manufactured.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  Electrolytic caps (especially aluminum) do generally have a pretty bad lifetime. Their specs (capacitance, and internal resistance aka ESR) degrade significantly over time, non-linearly, as temperature (and voltage) go up. At their rated voltage/temperature, lifetime maybe be ten thousand (or less) hours...barely enough to last a full year of 24x7 operation. This is one reason mining GPUs can be a questionable buy. The miner may have operated them at "low" temperature, but they were on 24x7, whereas a gaming PC may be only on a couple of hours a day a few times a week. Ultimately it comes down to how much the designers overspec'd components and/or factored in for wiggle room and how much the capacitors can degrade before circuits start acting up enough for the user to notice.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    > a gaming PC may be only on a couple of hours a day a few times a week Never met such a gamer
    - zabzonk 4y ago
      a gamer with a career and a life outside of "gaming"?
AmVess 4y ago
IIRC, the company that made those caps used a formula they stole from their competitors.
kurthr 4y ago
Brother bought a bunch of bad caps for their laser printers during lockdown. Now a year later things are coming home to roost. You can see it on the forums and on YouTube. Failures at right about the same 8-10000 hours, but since they're used in the power supply and printers are plugged in all the time... they die right outside warranty. Wouldn't be surprised if there's a class action, where everyone gets $5 off a new printer.
- pcurve 4y ago
  what a shame. Been using Brother HL-2170w printer for 15 years without any problem. And it was less than $120 new.
- autoexec 4y ago
  Printer companies are all basically evil, but Brother somehow got a decent reputation. I've got an old brother printer that isn't affected by this, and I really hope they do right by their customers here. Any company can get scammed on crap parts, either because they took a gamble trying to save a few cents or because those parts were all they could get their hands on, but now that's come back to bite them it's up to brother to put things right. It'd be shame for brother to trash their brand over a batch of bad capacitors. I've been happier with my current printer than any printer I've had since I got rid of my old dot matrix Epson, but we're going to need a new printer eventually, and I'd really like to not have to think too much about what brand to get or recommend.
  - ckozlowski 4y ago
    > Any company can get scammed on crap parts, either because they took a gamble trying to save a few cents or because those parts were all they could get their hands on It's true, though in the latter case, it can't be helped. I worked at an integrator from 2002-2005. Small outfit, building PCs and servers for businesses and local agencies. As a new member of their engineering department, one of the first issues we got asked to investigate was to look at heightened failures of network cards. Back then, we bought the ubiquitous 3Com 3C-905. All of our PCs were subjected to a battery of functional tests before shipping, and we were finding that an abnormal number of the cards were failing. We started looking at the failed ones more closely, and found them running extremely hot. These were passively cooled cards, and didn't need a heatsink under normal conditions. But on any of these, you couldn't hold a finger against without burning yourself. Functional ones as well. We got the batch of serial numbers, and send them to 3Com to ask what might be going on. And the answer we got was that they didn't exist. A bit of back and forth between 3Com, the distributor (a well-known and established company) and ourselves led us all to believe that they were a counterfit batch that entered the supply chain. We tracked down all of the cards from that order, and opened up every boxed PC that was to ship with one (I'll never forget the company president with his business shirt sleeves rolled up and a box cutter in his hand. He set the tone) and we pulled out every one. We sourced from reputable places, and I don't recall another instance of that occurring while I was there. But it was an interesting event in my career, and one I'll never forget.
vba616 4y ago
I wasn't paying that much attention, but the way I remember it was that some major manufacturer of capacitors was producing bad ones for a while. Not so much "cheap knock offs" as more like Takata airbags. The only capacitor manufacturer that comes to mind now is Kemet and their wikipedia page doesn't mention the episode so I don't know.
judge2020 4y ago
Is this perhaps what sparked putting "Japanese capacitors" on PSU boxes, as an indicator that the capacitors won't die in 10 months?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
calyth2018 4y ago
ABit took a hit hard around those times.
ksec 4y ago
>They lasted about 6000 hours - we could set it in a calendar I commented it on HN [1] not long ago and people said I was spreading conspiracy theory. And how it used to be a thing called capacitor marketing [2] and how Apple / Mac "used to " set itself apart. And let me just say this again because somehow the act of understand electronics is completely lost on modern days internet or more like in the West, planned obsolescence is still a thing and just because they aren't as bad as they were ( 6 months or at best 12-18 months ), doesn't mean they are not doing it. And more often than not, it is still the same old capacitor trick 20 years later. Edit: And some comments below are writing just about that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29296839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29296839 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468287

metadat 4y ago

What was the fate of the old, not-yet-dead motherboards?

savoytruffle 4y ago
They were dead. Recycled or landfilled. Hopefully the former. The goop leaks out and ruins the board anyway.
- metadat 4y ago
  I was trying to ask about the fate of the discarded but still working hardware. 4 months is 2920 hours, which is less than the stated 6000 hours to failure. Though only by 2x.

MBCook 4y ago

Yep. I remember my Asus VP6 dying of the dreaded capacitor plague.

f0e4c2f7 4y ago

Back in these days I worked at a small electronics shop run by an electrical engineer. People would come in saying their PC didn't work. He would pop it open, take out the motherboard, go "ah yes, puffy caps. See right there", then open a drawer full of recycled capacitors, and desolder the bad ones and resolder correct ones back on. And it worked! The shop ultimately closed but I still think back to that and a few other tricks as especially impressive.

notatoad 4y ago
>the shop ultimately closed yeah, sounds about right. i was also working in a repair shop around the same time, and we knew that we could repair the boards for our customers. but we also knew that we couldn't get away with charging enough to cover the cost of parts and labour unless we offered a warranty, and we couldn't reasonably offer a warranty on old motherboards. we did make pretty good money selling upgraded new computers to the people whose capacitors had failed. it always felt a bit dirty to sell somebody a new $800 laptop when their old computer was repairable, and i'm sure dell was doing even better than we were on that racket.
- danuker 4y ago
  Profit could not be there without value provided. The fact that you "get away with it" is only possible if you offer such a needed service, that people are willing to pay. If you want to be charitable, leave some money on the table for customers who look in dire straits. But you should not feel bad for making a profit (at least until you find yourself buying politicians).
- digitallyfree 4y ago
  I do board-level repairs on my own stuff (most recently replaced a shorted IC on a laptop motherboard) as it saves them from landfill and is an interesting debugging exercise. It can take a lot of time and effort and complex repairs may not be worth it due to the chance for failure (I've destroyed PCB traces and chips) as well as the fact that some parts simply aren't cost-effective to replace. In the laptop example the many evenings spent reading datasheets and probing circuits definitely cost more than a replacement unit if I billed the hours per my engineer's salary. When I was a student friends and relatives would give me (nice) broken electronics that they were going to throw out anyways, and if I liked the item (e.g. an expensive camera that I couldn't afford) I would put a lot of effort into fixing it.
- Sakos 4y ago
  I'm close with one of the last repair shops I know of in Germany that still does it. There still seems to be a market for it, but definitely not enough to keep an industry alive. > but we also knew that we couldn't get away with charging enough to cover the cost of parts and labour unless we offered a warranty I'm not sure about that. The store charges more than enough to cover it and still gets more business than it can handle while still providing a free warranty for 6-12 months.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

anyfoo 4y ago

Because of that drama, I remember some people (maybe me included, not sure anymore) actually thinking that electrolytic caps just generally had a pretty bad lifetime, and the need for replacement was just reality for products that were expected to last for more than an unreasonably short lifetime. Only later did I learn that it actually seemed to have been industrial espionage gone wrong! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague That's probably also the reason why so many retro enthusiasts just generally "re-cap" almost everything they touch. In a lot of cases, you just don't need to do that, and sometimes it could be worse to replace capacitors not affected by the capacitor plague: Any factory adjustments made to the device could well depend on the exact characteristics of the capacitors that were present in the device when it was manufactured.

KennyBlanken 4y ago
Electrolytic caps (especially aluminum) do generally have a pretty bad lifetime. Their specs (capacitance, and internal resistance aka ESR) degrade significantly over time, non-linearly, as temperature (and voltage) go up. At their rated voltage/temperature, lifetime maybe be ten thousand (or less) hours...barely enough to last a full year of 24x7 operation. This is one reason mining GPUs can be a questionable buy. The miner may have operated them at "low" temperature, but they were on 24x7, whereas a gaming PC may be only on a couple of hours a day a few times a week. Ultimately it comes down to how much the designers overspec'd components and/or factored in for wiggle room and how much the capacitors can degrade before circuits start acting up enough for the user to notice.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  > a gaming PC may be only on a couple of hours a day a few times a week Never met such a gamer
  - zabzonk 4y ago
    a gamer with a career and a life outside of "gaming"?

AmVess 4y ago

IIRC, the company that made those caps used a formula they stole from their competitors.

kurthr 4y ago

Brother bought a bunch of bad caps for their laser printers during lockdown. Now a year later things are coming home to roost. You can see it on the forums and on YouTube. Failures at right about the same 8-10000 hours, but since they're used in the power supply and printers are plugged in all the time... they die right outside warranty. Wouldn't be surprised if there's a class action, where everyone gets $5 off a new printer.

pcurve 4y ago
what a shame. Been using Brother HL-2170w printer for 15 years without any problem. And it was less than $120 new.
autoexec 4y ago
Printer companies are all basically evil, but Brother somehow got a decent reputation. I've got an old brother printer that isn't affected by this, and I really hope they do right by their customers here. Any company can get scammed on crap parts, either because they took a gamble trying to save a few cents or because those parts were all they could get their hands on, but now that's come back to bite them it's up to brother to put things right. It'd be shame for brother to trash their brand over a batch of bad capacitors. I've been happier with my current printer than any printer I've had since I got rid of my old dot matrix Epson, but we're going to need a new printer eventually, and I'd really like to not have to think too much about what brand to get or recommend.
- ckozlowski 4y ago
  > Any company can get scammed on crap parts, either because they took a gamble trying to save a few cents or because those parts were all they could get their hands on It's true, though in the latter case, it can't be helped. I worked at an integrator from 2002-2005. Small outfit, building PCs and servers for businesses and local agencies. As a new member of their engineering department, one of the first issues we got asked to investigate was to look at heightened failures of network cards. Back then, we bought the ubiquitous 3Com 3C-905. All of our PCs were subjected to a battery of functional tests before shipping, and we were finding that an abnormal number of the cards were failing. We started looking at the failed ones more closely, and found them running extremely hot. These were passively cooled cards, and didn't need a heatsink under normal conditions. But on any of these, you couldn't hold a finger against without burning yourself. Functional ones as well. We got the batch of serial numbers, and send them to 3Com to ask what might be going on. And the answer we got was that they didn't exist. A bit of back and forth between 3Com, the distributor (a well-known and established company) and ourselves led us all to believe that they were a counterfit batch that entered the supply chain. We tracked down all of the cards from that order, and opened up every boxed PC that was to ship with one (I'll never forget the company president with his business shirt sleeves rolled up and a box cutter in his hand. He set the tone) and we pulled out every one. We sourced from reputable places, and I don't recall another instance of that occurring while I was there. But it was an interesting event in my career, and one I'll never forget.

vba616 4y ago

I wasn't paying that much attention, but the way I remember it was that some major manufacturer of capacitors was producing bad ones for a while. Not so much "cheap knock offs" as more like Takata airbags. The only capacitor manufacturer that comes to mind now is Kemet and their wikipedia page doesn't mention the episode so I don't know.

judge2020 4y ago

Is this perhaps what sparked putting "Japanese capacitors" on PSU boxes, as an indicator that the capacitors won't die in 10 months?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

calyth2018 4y ago

ABit took a hit hard around those times.

ksec 4y ago

>They lasted about 6000 hours - we could set it in a calendar I commented it on HN [1] not long ago and people said I was spreading conspiracy theory. And how it used to be a thing called capacitor marketing [2] and how Apple / Mac "used to " set itself apart. And let me just say this again because somehow the act of understand electronics is completely lost on modern days internet or more like in the West, planned obsolescence is still a thing and just because they aren't as bad as they were ( 6 months or at best 12-18 months ), doesn't mean they are not doing it. And more often than not, it is still the same old capacitor trick 20 years later. Edit: And some comments below are writing just about that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29296839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29296839 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468287