I haven't been on here in a few days because my computer kept locking up just after boot-up.  As it turned out three of the six capacitors next to the processor had blown and the remaining three were suspect.  I took the board out and managed to replace the six capacitors.  Unsoldering them turned out to be the hardest part.  The machine is now running like a top.  

I know, Cool Story Bro.  But, I thought I'd share.

My old mobo went out the same way last year.  I replaced only the caps I saw were swollen, instead of replacing all of them.  The others must've been had issues, because it failed a few weeks later.  I was planning on upgrading anyways, so I wasn't too concerned.

Depending on your soldering skills, it may have failed due to the MB coming apart from too much heat during the repair. This is why I don't fix motherboards, way to much to go wrong and I cant afford a solder bath to fix them properly.



 

I have a temperature controlled soldering iron and used to do component repair in the early 1990's.  There was no de-lamination or other damage caused by removing the caps.  Besides the swollen caps, the 4 pin plug that comes from the psu had dark discoloration on two pins, and that could've been related to the blown caps, or a different problem in itself.

The issue my pc was having was it would randomly turn off, until it wouldn't come back on at all.  Replacing the two caps appeared to fix the problem, at least for two weeks.  It was an Athlon X2-5000 built right before Vista came out, so it was ready for replacement.

My buddy from whom I got the caps has noticed failure of a lot of devices due to this issue:  

He is also of the opinion that this mode of failure may be deliberate as the failure almost always occurs shortly after the warrantee expires.  He thinks it may be like a chemical fuse that goes off after a certain time.  

Re-capping some devices has brought him a bit of income, hence why he had the caps on hand.

The whole thing about Chinese stealing electrolyte formula really only had legs about 12-15 years ago, and only for certain brands.

These days, it's just simple economics:  Cheap capacitors are cheap, and save the company a couple of dollars per board.

Yes, many do it because if the board lasts two years or three, it's out of warranty.   And in that time you may want to upgrade anyway, right?  

So, these days, lots of places use solid organic capacitors, they'll far outlast the usefulness of the board.  However, some of the cheap places use wet electrolytics that *LOOK* like the solid units.  The only real difference noticeable is that the wet ones have score marks on top (for when they inevitably fail), while the solids don't.

Kudos to him for capturing that revenue.