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[email protected] jurb6006@gmail.com is offline
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Default BSOD, bulging caps, on Gateway GT5056

Replace some of the ones that read 0.2. They are probably a bank of caps. The common thing is to use a bunch of them in parallel. You can confirm this by meter. Of course all the negatives will read continuity, but in a bank of caps, both leads will read continuity.

If you have a bank of five caps, 0.2 ohms ESR is too high and that's one of the reasons they used so many. Another is ripple current.

When you have this, you can just replace a couple in a bank to see if it cures the problem. In fact when it gets to that point I don't even clip the leads off, I just let the replacement(s) stand up off the board. If the problem is fixed, then I sink them down and snip them, and of course replace the rest.

The one you replaced was obviously by itself. The others are probably a bank of five and they are probably off the output of a switching regulator. They might be running at like 2 volts and anywhere from 2 to 20 amps depending on processor load. The math says 0.2 ohms is way too high. Say it's 3 volts at 10 amps. That's like a 0.33 ohm load approzimately. That could make the ripple voltage almost half of the supply concievably. Coming off a high speed switching regulator, that is quite noisy and the data will be FUBAR. Temperature will also affct it.

If you find those five caps are just all in parallel, the ESR should be practically imeasurable.

If it doesn't work, that's why you didn't cut the leads on the replacements..