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Hit 1,000 motherboard repairs and one number stood out
I keep a log of every board I work on and just passed 1,000 repairs last week. What surprised me was that 317 of them had bad capacitors near the CPU socket. That is nearly a third of all failures tied to one common part. Has anyone else tracked their most frequent fix? I am curious if your numbers line up with mine.
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mary_foster9222d ago
Jumping right in with a slight correction on your capacitor count. It's actually a bit more common than you think, especially on older boards from the early 2000s. The electrolytic caps near the socket were notorious for drying out and bulging, so your 317 is probably on the low side if you include boards with leaking caps that looked fine at first glance. I'd bet the real number for bad caps in that spot is closer to 400 or more once you factor in the ones with hairline cracks you can barely see (trust me, I've chased those ghosts). Your log is still solid data though, it's just that those caps hide their failures sometimes.
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garcia.tyler22d ago
Those caps hide their failures sometimes" is exactly right. I'd add that heat from the CPU often makes those cracks even harder to spot until you pull the board and look at them from the side with a bright light.
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