Solid Capacitor Motherboards Introduced

jckrbbt writes with news that Gigabyte has introduced solid capacitor motherboards in its Intel 945 chipset products. From the article: "[S]olid capacitors have a higher tolerance for higher temperatures and they also perform better with higher frequencies and higher current than electrolytic capacitors. The superior heat resistance and better electric conductivity will allow PC enthusiasts to tweak the highest levels of performance from their system without fear of excessive capacitor wear or exploding capacitors."

finally

[Swimport]

Capacitors having the shortest lifespan of most electrical components means if this catches on there will be less electronic waste, and more reliable machines. Although I bet these cost twice as much....

Re:Average

[Anonymous Coward]

I have seen them last less than a year. All you have to do is check where the capacitor is from. If it is from China (which is likely), then it has a high probability of failing very quickly. This is due to their stealing the formula from a Japanese company who became aware of the attempted theft and fed the women a recipe from the early 60's (and well known to hold up for only a year).

3 YEARS?

[vistic]

"Solid capacitors also last longer with an average lifetime of 23 years compared to only three for electrolytic capacitors, according to Gigabyte."

Motherboards may get obsolete fast, but I still would expect a longer life than just three years.

If this is true, I'm amazed so many old computers work so well. Maybe this is a bit off. In either case, it seems with such a huge difference in life span, unless there's a huge change in cost, the extra reliability offered by solid capacitors should make them standard in every motherboard. I'm not an electrical engineer though (or an economist).

Re:Average

[thedarknite]

I'm curious as to how they calculate these numbers, I've never had a capacitor fail and I play with a fair number of boxes that are beyond their 3 year "average". Then again I've never used a Gigabyte board, so they may well have had a shoddy supplier at one point.

Re:Average

[Anonymous Coward]

The standard life test for an electrolytic capacitor is 1000hr at rated temperature. For most consumer equipment, this is 85C oe 105C depending on which electrolyte is used (and price paid). The life of electronic components doubles for every 10C reduction in temperature. At end of life, an electrolytic caacitor is allowed a 50% loss of capacitance and doubled ESR. For most cases these caps work fine (provided the designer included margin). In a PC application, it is reasonable to expect operating temperatures of about 45C to 55C. This would mean lives between 8000hr and 32,000hr.

I find it interesting that the solid electrolyte caps have finally found a home. These have been around fo about 20 years in one form or another. Maybe now the price will start falling and the small wet electrolytics will go the way of the vacuum tube.

Re:3 YEARS?

[Anonymous Coward]

so many old computers work so well.

Capacitors are generally used for filters and timing circuits. The motherboard I'm running right now has a capacitor at the edge of the AGP slot that I accidentally crushed (hey, I thought the new video card was just tough to push in, sue me). I only noticed it because the computer refused to boot until I cleaned the guts of the cap off the motherboard, and it runs just fine since then. Perhaps it won't deal with certain line noises anymore, or some USB port hardware runs 15 times as fast, but I'd say that I'll never notice either with this getup. My mother had a TV that was perhaps 20 years old. One day a cap (audibly) blew, and the only difference was that the scan controls no longer kept the picture entirely within the screen, sort of like a permanent 125% magnification, with the extra running off all four edges. She watched that tv another year or two before finally buying a new one.

Dell GX270's

[Gates82]

Dell should start using these for their GX-270 line. I (1 out of 5 at the site I worked) have replaced a good 30 270 Motherbo--- (sorry per dell, system boards) that have video problems. All stem from bulgin and leaky capacitors. Most of these systems where between 1-2 years old (none over three).

--
so who is hotter? Ali or Ali's sister.

About time!

[Orphaze]

As someone who has painstakingly replaced all the capacitors on two separate motherboards, I can definitely see why this is a good idea. The most recent was my Epox 8kra2+ board (with an Athlon XP 2600+, not over clocked.) I noticed the caps beginning to bulge slightly on top and develop some crusty electrolyte "dandruff" on the heads after 2 years of use, but I decided to hold off on major surgery until I began to notice any problems.

About a year later the system began to lock up mysteriously, and after ruling everything else out (this was my main system after all) I grabbed my soldering iron and began an hour or so of some rather nerve wrecking soldering. Every single 1000F and 1500F cap on the board needed replacement, so an old PIII board became the donor.

I measured the bad caps after removing them and most of them were off by about 300-700F, way outside of tolerance. After I finished I booted the system up, ran memtest for a few hours successfully, and never had a lockup since.

Doesn't really do any good for a computer though

[Sycraft-fu]

I see VERY few computers failed due to a cap problem before they are retired on account of being too old to be useful anymore. The most common component I see fail is the HD, which is no surprise given that it's mechanical. This could be useful for devices that are good for 25 years, but comptuers tend to get thrown out after 5.

Re:I'm sure the ...

[PeterBrett]

Secondly, there is no outstanding debate in the industry on whether or not polypropylene, film, or even tantalum capacitors (what they're referring to as solid, though they're probably talking about tantalums) are of superior quality to electrolytics for audio applications. Electrolytics have changing thermal characteristics, worse tolerances, and tend to introduce a small amount of phase shift into whatever AC signal you're passing through them. Yes, these properties are measurable with the right equipment and are not generally questioned.

Agreed. Tantalum capacitors have much better performance than electrolytics in most circumstances. However, there is outstanding debate about whether the use of tantalum capacitors is ethical, as tantalum is just about the rarest element that's actually used in the electronics industry and most of the deposits are in developing countries. Accusations have been levelled that electronics manufacturers are going to inordinate lengths to secure tantalum deposits, and the people who live there are the losers (especially since the by-products of processing tantalum ore are decidedly unpleasant).

I try to avoid using tantalum capacitors in my own designs as far as possible, trying to keep to NASA's guidelines for component derating [nasa.gov] when using electrolytics. Where I need precision capacitances I design the circuit so that a ceramic NP0 or similar EIA Class 1 capacitor can be used instead. I haven't had any capacitors fail yet.

Re:Doesn't really do any good for a computer thoug

[repvik]

I've seen a lot. Of those, a lot were caused by this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague [wikipedia.org]

Re:I'm sure the ...

[vojtech]

The capacitors in question are not tantalum, but solid polymer capacitors. A tantalum capacitor design would be possible, but would be very expensive and also rather bulky.

Compared to tantalum capacitors, these capacitors reach much higher capacities at the same physical volume, and the same or better ESL/ESR.

See for example here:

• United Chemi-Con PSA series [chemi-con.com]
• Famous Sanyo OS-CON [sanyo.com]

These aluminium electrolytic capacitors, with a solid conductive polymer electrolytic find their way even on most current mainboards, most often in the CPU DC-DC convertor circuits. They're usually easily recognizable from classic electrolytics by their small size and metal casing without a plastic sleeve.

A benefit from an all-solid-polymer capacitor mainboard is dubious, since classic alimuium electrolytic capacitors work just fine in many roles they're needed for, particularly in low-ripple-current situations.

Re:I'm sure the ...

[DrDitto]

Yet another NASA engineer who potentially compromises the design of a spacecraft in the name of environmentalism. You wanna know why the Space Shuttle is having all these recent foam problems that crashed the Colombia? Because they switched the formula to remove freon in order to be more environmental even though the EPA gave NASA a special waiver. The original design worked, but it used freon in the foam. Don't believe me? Here is a journal entry from NASA's website in 1997!!!: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/people/journals/space/ka tnik/sts87-12-23.html [nasa.gov]

During the STS-87 mission, there was a change made on the external tank. Because of NASA's goal to use environmentally friendly products, a new method of "foaming" the external tank had been used for this mission and the STS-86 mission. It is suspected that large amounts of foam separated from the external tank and impacted the orbiter. This caused significant damage to the protective tiles of the orbiter. Foam cause damage to a ceramic tile?! That seems unlikely, however when that foam is combined with a flight velocity between speeds of MACH two to MACH four, it becomes a projectile with incredible damage potential. The big question? At what phase of the flight did it happen and what changes need to be made to correct this for future missions? I will explain the entire process.

Yet somehow this never got mentioned by the mass media back when Colombia disintegrated over Texas.

Re:Average

[OrangeTide]

I've worked for companies where we had to RMA an entire run of our product because the caps we received from the supplier were below spec and were exploding in the field (DSL modem). I've also have replaced people's motherboards because they were running pretty unstable (even in memtest86) and had some lumpy looking caps on the board. The PSU seemed large enough so I can only point the finger at out of spec caps.

Most motherboards are Taiwanese not Chinese. Although I'm sure the government of China would like us to believe the two places are equivalent. I still can't believe GW Bush would rather play around in Iraq than help foster democracy in Taiwan which actively asked us for help in leaving the ROC and the influence of the PRC. *sigh* I guess Taiwan didn't have enough oil interests.