The Hardware Horrors Page

In my job as a PC Technician, you get to see a lot of unusual yet 'interesting' things. Here are some of the more memorable types of faults and disasters I've seen from time to time. I'll continue to add to this section as new material makes itself apparent.

Pustulating Capacitor syndrome

...or, how to ruin a perfectly good motherboard. Here we see a typical example of pustulating capacitor syndrome. This problem first reared it's head around 2001 or so, and was a result of an electrolytic capacitor manufacturing company employee who stole what he thought was the formula for capacitor electrolyte (it wasn't), and then went into business for himself. His capacitors were much cheaper than anyone else's (due to the simplistic formula), and he soon sold a lot of product.

The only problem was, he stole an incomplete formula. The result was all caps made by him fail after a few years (less with heavy use and/or high temperature operation) - and here is the result.

The typical failure sees the electrolytic capacitors around the CPU, AGP and RAM power regulation sections swelling and bursting, often leaking a strange brown goo as well. The result is failed motherboard, sometimes with collateral damage e.g. damaged CPU, damaged power regulation FET's, etc. Motherboards can sometimes be rescued by replacement of all effected capacitors; however replacement caps are not cheap at around $3-$4 each, with up to 12 caps required per motherboard and a couple of hours labour to replace, it's basically not practical to do a repair unless you can do the soldering yourself and have a ready source of spare caps at minimal cost.

Gigabyte boards were the worst name-brand effected (virtually any gigabyte board made around 2000-2002 is effected), although MSI, ECS, ASUS and virtually other well known 'made in Taiwan' brands were effected to a lessor degree also. Whilst this 'problem' is now resigned to history, there are tonnes of mid-to-late PIII era, Athlon/Athlon XP and early-mid P4 motherboards out there that suffer this flaw, and are now ticking time bombs waiting to fail.

These boards currently deliver us a constant stream of repair/upgrade revenue, and will continue to do so for a number of years yet.

All of the electrolytic caps on this board are swollen -the convex shape of the aluminium top is the give-sway. Caps should have a dead flat top - once it starts to bend upwards, it's well on it's way to failure. Thus, you can pick a bad board at a glance - bowed and./or leaking top caps = stuffed board.

Trivia: The tops of the caps are stamped with a pattern of thin lines for a reason - these lines form a weak spot (a pressure relief valve), which is deliberately included so that if the capacitor does build up a dangerous internal pressure for any reason, the aluminium fails at this point in a manner which minimises harm by allowing the pressure to escape safely. If the "pressure relief valve" wasn't there, the exploding capacitor could cause a lot of damage e.g. flying shrapnel, fire/sparks/smoke/flame, etc. As any devious high-school electronics student will tell you, a capacitor explodes very violently indeed when reverse based or driven over it's rated voltage. I've seen power points turned into nothing more than a pile of molten black plastic as a result of such student pranks. Beware!

Yes Johnny, a bad USB device really can kill your motherboard!

This is what really happens when you plug in a bad USB device.... in this particular case, it was an external HDD enclosure with a faulty mains power adapter. I'm sure the bang would have been spectacular.

Destruction of the southbridge was complete. Note missing piece physically blown out!!

Burnt PCB underneath the the USB Header. note bubbled section above - PCB had swollen about 2mm due to extreme heat generated.

The PCB mount fuse didn't do it's job this time - just kind of burnt itself to a frazzle.

More to come .... keep watching this space!