In article ,
"Bob Eager" writes:
On Tue, 9 Jan 2007 23:16:14 UTC, Tim S wrote:

Talking of which, slashdot's been carrying various articles about Gigabyte
boasting about using solid capacitors on some of their mobos for longevity.
Apparantly, the people were having grief with electrolytics blowing after
3-4 years - which seemed strange as I've had 20 year old hot running
electronics (amplifiers and TVs for example) which managed to not exhibit
that problem. More likely some berk bought a load of cheap crap caps for
some production runs and got the electrolytics a bad name, so maketing
stepped in and made a "feature" of the whole debacle.

There was a well known capacitor fiasco a few years ago, wheer (AFAIR)
there was some faulty 'cloning' of a manufacturer's products. The faulty
items went into *many* motherboards. They may or may not have been
electrolytic, but 'faulty caps' is probably a good bit of propaganda
now.

They were electrolytics. A Chinese company stole the formula for
the electrolite from a Taiwanise manufacturer, and churned out
millions of the things. These were bought by many motherboard
manufacturers. However, the formula stolen was one which turned
out not to work and was not used by the Taiwanise manufacturer.

The manufacturers who bought the faulty electrolytics have been
faced with repairing or replacing motherboards. Dell were in
our office on almost a weekly basis replacing motherboards at
a previous employer.

--
Andrew Gabriel