But what are A-brand caps? But it’s a little bit more complicated. VidHD and “Total Replay”: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together! Tantalum capacitors, like most electrolytics, are polarized capacitors. A while ago, i recapped 2 CD32, 1 A600, 2 A1200s for exactly the same reason. Indeed, it’s only the newer Amigas (that is, A600, A1200, A4000 and CD32) that use surface mount capacitors and are therefore under serious danger from leaking electrolyte. The capacitor plague was a problem related to a higher-than-expected failure rate of non-solid aluminum electrolytic capacitors, ... High failure rates occurred in many well-known brands of electronics, and was particularly evident in motherboards, video cards, and power supplies of personal computers, leading to premature failure of these devices. I can’t say for sure that I have ever seen an example of a capacitor failure utterly destroying a system. Other types of caps it can be a different story: Those filter caps on the power supplies across the mains input — yeah, those paper caps crack and pop with horrible smoke. I’ve described this adventure on my site (Everex-286 and MFM harddrive) [ Blake here, linking to his post (Romanian) and via Google Translate to English. ] Some corrosion around them, in worst case through holes getting black, small spots of liquid. (2020 Edition) - Byte Cellar, Have a Helping of 8-bit Holiday Cheer! With tantalum capacitors I’ve had quite an interesting adventure last year, both the original and the replacement (replacement being around the same age if not older) failing short. Failed e-caps with well known brands may have had failures not related to defective electrolyte. I posted a high-score photo of my Amiga 2000, to which the PVM is attached, to r/Retrobattlestations and a reader with the same screen noticed a set of divergent RGB lines at the top of the display and told me how to adjust the display settings to remove them. I repaired several professional video cameras meanwhile, sometimes replacing more than 150 capacitors in one single camera, plus PCB repair, you may have to work 10-20 hours on one of them. They are only there to provide some EMI isolation to prevent noise from the equipment from making it back into the power grid, or vice versa. However, many of the cheaper brands of caps, most notably those coming from east asian manufacturers, have historically had problems in this regard. Even my “Field Found C64” is still sporting all its original electrolytic caps after being outside directly exposed to weather for 20 years. I’ll proactively change those or just remove them. Power dissipated in a capacitor can be expressed as I^2*R, where I is the ripple current in Amps RMS, and R is the ESR. Power supplies which use capacitors suffering from the capacitor plague may experience premature failure when the capacitance drops to 4% of the original value. They are very commonly found in switching power supplies used in lots of computers from the 1970s and 1980s, from home 8-bit machines to minicomputers. I’ve wrenched on maybe 8 or so Tandy 100 portables, and only seen 1 with damage from leaking caps. On the other hand, i also had to replace capacitors in an Access Virus b, from the 2000s. Well. But I’ve seen this. The latter are guaranteed go up in smoke 0 to 60 minutes after power-up. In my work in industrial electronics I mostly come across A-brand caps, no doubt. I also work in a company that is a service center for a major manufacturer of IT/electronics products. Yup: https://www.badcaps.net/index.php?s=6b9a4f770b9723109ba7fec9b0b1674c&pageid=causes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFSNgDQS5JE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Defekte_Kondensatoren.jpg, In 2005, Dell spent some US$420 million replacing motherboards outright and on the logistics of determining whether a system was in need of replacement. A badly laid out PSU full of NCCs running very hot is probably going to die before a well-cooled one full of CapXons. Your best bet is to get some name brand liquid capacitors that have a low ESR value and can withstand higher temperatures (above 105+C) to ensure a long life with your monitor. My Computer. This has doomed MANY popular and expensive brands of motherboards, including: Abit, Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, Supermicro, DFI, Dell, Hewlett Packard, IBM, and MANY more! ( see also The Capacitor plague ). That said, I’ve some personal experiences to add to the excellent explanation by Joe Zatarski. They also do not have very accurate capacitance (a typical tolerance range for electrolytics is +80/-20%, though you can find +/-20%). There is an epidemic of failure in electrolytic capacitors from certain shady manufacturers. After removal, you usually find the mess below the capacitor. Often, you don’t see the problem with them at a first glance, but there are hints. Your email address will not be published. At a former place of work I was known as the electronics guru. And for a seller to have piece of mind that they’re buyer isn’t going to think you totally ripped them off because that one capacitor leaked and you didn’t thoroughly educate them? No ripple on dc rail. Since I wrote this post, I have noticed what seems to be evidence of capacitors beginning to fail in my Sony PVM RGB display. Sometimes power supplies will protect themselves into a direct short, and nothing will happen other than the power supply failing to start. I have seen many examples online of a system malfunctioning and, in diagnosing, a blown capacitor was found and replaced and the system was healed. —capacitors have higher internal losses in this case generally, self heating can cause capacitors to fail My only old machine is an Apple //c and it’s going strong ;-). DST. The following brands are associated with the recent (1998-200x) incorrect electrolyte formulation problem (a.k.a. For use in SMPS, special low-ESR capacitor types have become popular in the past few decades to reduce this loss and allow capacitors to take more ripple current without shortening the life of the capacitor. Choyo. A notable capacitor, are the Rifa safety capacitors made from a paper dielectric. gassito. Are there better brands I should go with? However their pins were not loose, the solder joint was good and I found pressing on these capacitors would temporarily restore the picture. I would like to continue on as I have always done, using these systems as-is with the plan of replacing capacitors on a given system in the future, as they inevitably fail. They are constructed as a metal can filled with an electrolyte and two foils, usually aluminum, that make up the capacitor plates. Electrolytic capacitors used in linear power supplies (those operating in purely DC circuits, or in simple transformer+rectifier supplies) rarely fail in my experience, since they tend not to get very hot. I also don’t like the “replace all capacitors” mentality, but there is a bit of truth in it. Interesting timing. I Sit at the Round Table (And Dance Whene’er I’m Able), Looking Back on 35 Years as an Amiga User, The Infinity Modules Player: Never Turn Off Your Amiga Again, Apple //c Scene From ’80s Bond Film “A View to a Kill” Perfectly Re-Created With Applesoft BASIC, The eMate 300 Out In Front for “BBS Week V”, Firing Up the Apple //c for “Not x86 Week”, Announcing “NMSspot” – My New “No Man’s Sky” Blog, A Quick “Heads Up” for My New BBSing Resource Page, The Amiga 1000 Sings Songs of the Season for Holiday Music Week VII, Have a Helping of 8-bit Holiday Cheer! One of the foils is generally anodized to produce an insulating oxide layer, though nonpolar types with both foils insulated exist as well. But if pushed to make a choice, I would choose a Japanese manufacturer like Nichicon over others. Rostos. All low-voltage side caps in Mac LC, Osbourbe PSUs I’ve had be dry or otherwise leaked. Switched-mode power supply-Wikipedia. Failed capacitor. I began collecting vintage computers in 1999 — 20 years ago. Thus, only capacitors from a certain time period are affected, because only those contain the tainted electrolyte. And to simplify things, i always use them :) Panasonic FC, FP, FK are my favorites, in THT as well as SMD. The capacitor plague was a problem related to a higher-than-expected failure rate of non-solid aluminium electrolytic capacitors, between 1999 and 2007, especially those from some Taiwanese manufacturers, [1] [2] due to faulty electrolyte composition that caused corrosion accompanied by gas generation, often rupturing the case of the capacitor from the build-up of pressure. However, there is something else that might prove to be a problem for equipment from that era and that is smaller (in both size and capacity) decoupling capacitors with rubber seals. —In my experience, failure is rare without design flaw (capacitor near hot heatsink, for example) On machines with poor quality PCBs (Atari XEs, for example), you’re more likely to get damage from the re-work than from the caps since those boards are known to lose pads easily but not well known (to me, at least) for suffering cap damage often. The capacitor plague is due to faulty electrolytes of this type. These capacitors, luckily, are not usually critical to the power supply, and can be removed without affecting function of the equipment. As these old tube electronics often have near-impossible to replace transformers, this is really another risk you shouldn’t take. In my experience repairing machines and talking with those who repair them, there are some known replace-on-sight caps. Finally, I’ve seen some anecdotal evidence that heat or humidity is a factor in electrolytic cap failure modes. –can fail short from mechanical stress (shock and vibe) due to cracking For some reason, the ones mentioned all the time are Nichicon, Nippon Chemicon, Panasonic and Rubycon. The defective capacitors were marked with previously unknown brands such as "Tayeh", "Choyo", or "Chhsi". Two classes that come to mind immediately are: I’ve recently had a batch of Honda Beat (Japanese Kei car) ECUs on the bench. Final thoughts. Other times, the power supply will kick on as normal, and deliver significant power into the shorted tantalum capacitor. So conclusion is that today elcos for consumer and low end industrial products are deliberately not built to last. electrolytics, besides the obvious design issues (temperature, ripple above nominal voltage) we encountered, around the late 2000s – early 2010s, quite a lot of monitor power supply boards with capacitors going bad even though the boards were sitting in storage, never powered on. But, I would like opinions as to just how risky this is. Ceramic capacitors are generally a disk-type in thru-hole versions, and a small rectangular device in surface mount types. I imagine the post is oriented towards electrolytic capacitors, but I’ll give a quick run down of the types you’re likely to see in consumer electronics. the infamous 68k Macs, I’ve had one Mac Classic with this exact same problem, and also a friend working in a another service shop told me he was replacing hundreds of small 1uF capacitors in camcorders in the late 1990s – early 2000s. My 34 year old A1000 and the A2000 run great without issue. Moving on to film capacitors, these capacitors generally have the same advantages as ceramic capacitors. Materials commonly used as dielectrics include glass, ceramic, plastic film, paper, mica, air, and oxide layers. What experiences have you had? Yeah - cheap capacitors are the bane of a lot of electronic items. As mentioned in a comment above, in some vintage computing groups it’s “en vogue” to preventively replace all capacitors. I am part of various Facebook groups related to old machines and in the Amiga world, they go crazy about recapping everything preventively, not so much in the Atari or Apple groups. GSC There are generally two types, however. All Rubycon brand. Tantalums are also generally used where bulk capacitance is needed for power supply filtering, but they don’t get nearly as large as electrolytics, and they aren’t quite as dense. Blown tantalum caps can possibly cause some instability since they essentially go open once they blow — but there are telltale signs of their failure. I measured ESR of some of them which I replaced just as a precaution, and couldn’t believe, they are still low-esr value. That machine had a label on the bottom indicating it was sold at a store in south Florida, meaning plenty of heat/humidity. From my personal encounters this includes the Epson HX20/PX4,8 computers and their accessories, TRS80-100 series, Apple Newton 100, Amstrad NC-100 among others, Only encountered a few tantalum shorts, from the 80s (orange tear drops). In these cases, the PCB was never seriously damaged due to how these capacitors fail. Canicon. I replace them as a preventative measure because they can physically damage components around them when they inevitably cook off. So were the caps really that bad in Amigas or is it more of a “cultural” thing? Earlier Amigas don’t use these caps and likely won’t ever have a problem outside of failed power supplies. -ceramic capacitors I’m into vintage computing myself but not in a very structured way. There have been a number of reports in newsgroups and on-line services about leaky electrolytic capacitors on computer motherboards. Some A500s for example use floppy drives which contain SMT capacitors. I, personally, don’t mind opening a machine every year or two to check for leakage, but some folks never will. G-Luxon. They can be made with fairly precise capacitance values, although there are a wide variety of ceramic capacitors with different dielectric types that have vastly differing characteristics. Leaking caps need to get replaced soon, and the board needs to be cleaned to prevent further damage. The Capacitor Plague has hit our beloved TiVo's! I had heard that the cap electrolyte recipe theft story was actually a cover for a major supplier screwup, so as not to damage their rep. Only probs i have had was with elcaps failing on 90’s vintage boards, even a Gigabyte and other major suppliers. The other type, are used where the design calls for something more linear, or with higher accuracy, or with better temperature coefficient. Capacitor failure is real. Linear power supply, pcb, transistorized, not much heating, but there are many timing circuits also with elcos. Source: Wikipedia. Fujitsu (FPCAP) Fulltec. When ceramic capacitors crack, they can short out. "The capacitor plague was a problem related to a higher-than-expected failure rate of non-solid aluminum electrolytic capacitors, ... High failure rates occurred in many well-known brands of electronics, and was particularly evident in motherboards, video cards, and power supplies of personal computers, leading to premature failure of these devices." Your email address will not be published. Hopefully I have managed to teach a bit about the different common capacitor types, and give a new perspective on likely failures and some troubleshooting tips. You need to understand the impact of that capacitance on the circuit design. Scroll down and have a look. The reasons for the “capacitor plague” have been very well researched. People come to me with what’s perceived as a simple fault (“it loads games but the colours are funny”, “it works but the audio is crackly/only works on one speaker”, “it’s fine except the mouse doesn’t work”), expecting a simple recap to fix the issue, but instead finding that the entire video output stage has to be reconstructed with copper foil, wire, epoxy and many hours of labour. Pingback: Ask Hackaday: Experiences With Capacitor Failure, As others have mentioned all SMT electrolytic caps in Macs and PowerBooks from the 68k era (early 1990s and on) are leaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72sJ5Infuu0 posted 2016-Feb-20, 11:08 am AEST ref: whrl.pl/ReyCjb. \$\endgroup\$ – hacktastical May 15 at 17:02 \$\begingroup\$ Thanks! An unknown number of the third generation Slingboxes were susceptible to the capacitor plague. This is not something I will do immediately, as I am not in fear of the screen dying in the event of full capacitor failure (the overall effect of the comments I’ve received on this post have put me somewhat at ease as regards my stance on dealing with capacitors), but it’s now on the list of things I will eventually need to take care of. Mnem comments down lower about the A1200 and 600. Popping or shorted tantalum caps — those happen too. I am hoping, with this post, to get feedback in the comments from other vintage computer users users of vintage computers (I almost walked into that one…) regarding the issue of capacitor failure. Under the circumstances that’s not bad (especially compared with the “disasters” that I see in modern SMPSs). :-(. So my advice to you would be to have the capacitors replaced in all of your machines that use SMT capacitors, but just carry on as you are with the through-hole machines. Electrolytics have been subject to counterfeit before . Contact me, Blake Patterson, at. –CRTs Not sure why. CapXon. The former are guaranteed to leak and damage your board. They'd come to me with power supply boards from TV's and I'd pronounce "Desolder all the electrolytic capacitors, then buy new Nippon Chemicon capacitors of the same value and maybe a slightly higher voltage and replace, being certain to observe the polarity." They don’t look like the typical off-brand types though (violet color, not black or green.) Many of the poorly designed capacitors made it to mass market. THT components seem to be less critical, but i also replaced hundreds of them, especially ELNA, Nichicon and old Matushita/Panasonic like to fail, but maybe they were just the most common ones. Broken or cracked vent, often accompanied with visible crusty rust-like brown or red dried electrolyte deposits. Handbook of Inorganic Chemicals. —example of burned rifa capacitor in Apple Profile: https://imgur.com/OZcZWzO. He echoes what I have heard in forums re: these Amiga models. The Amiga was perhaps the last mainstream “home computer”, and as a result, pretty much the only one to last into the age of surface mount technology. Up themselves the reasons for the “ replace all capacitors one has to capacitor plague brands risk. 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