Arfa Daily wrote:

To some extent, I don't think it is all the capacitors' fault, to be honest.
The places that electrolytics are found in today's equipments, tend to be
very stressful to them, when you couple in other factors such as the
international law on pain of death that requires designers to place electros
as close as is physically possible to anything that runs hot, and then to
mount the power supply or whatever board they're on, upside down in the
corner of the equipment with the least airflow, it's actually not that
surprising that these devices exhibit such *apparent* unreliability.

So why do the good brands tolerate those conditions so well while the
same old junk brands don't? And contrary to what you say, most of the
caps aren't in hot spots but are running at under 60 Celcius

I also suspect that the eco-fanaticism that has given us lead-free solder doesn't
help either, as the elevated process temperatures required to get this
hateful stuff to stick to anything other than itself, is known to not do some
components a lot of good,

But the problems with junk capacitors showed up way before the switch
to lead-free solder, and only one of my RoHS mobos has so far popped a
cap, probably more because it's newer (late 2007), not because it's
better, but it has the same OST brand junk caps.

The real fault lies with the makers of junk, period.