Announcement

**PCBONEZ** · 11-19-2009, 02:33 AM

**999999999** · 11-19-2009, 12:26 PM

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

Thanks for the links, but I'd call it a bit of chicken 'n egg... There were some AOpen boards with good caps and those are what people should buy. If someone buys based only on price they may be letting greed and ignorance get the better of them in the long run. I could say the same about many consumer goods for example we just bought a GE washing machine that isn't too bad but their low end is junk.

**999999999** · 11-19-2009, 12:40 PM

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

^ You don't need any particular brand of caps in the non-switching-supply areas, they only need to have stable electrolyte. Even Asus, fairly well know for decent caps over the years has frequently used caps we don't like much scattered across boards and they generally survive fine.

By my last comment about buying based on price I did not mean how much does the board cost, I meant were there other boards with similar chipset, features set, better caps but the buyer picked the less expensive brand and model not being able to tell the difference between the two.

**PCBONEZ** · 11-19-2009, 06:09 PM

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

Originally posted by 999999999

Thanks for the links, but I'd call it a bit of chicken 'n egg... There were some AOpen boards with good caps and those are what people should buy. If someone buys based only on price they may be letting greed and ignorance get the better of them in the long run. I could say the same about many consumer goods for example we just bought a GE washing machine that isn't too bad but their low end is junk.

Well I guess you didn't understand or look at the links.
A number of the links are to 'BX era' Dual CPU P3 Tualatin Server boards.
- NOT low end parts.
I don't consider more ~recent boards in the $200-$300 price range to be at the low end either.
-
If AOpen's high end boards of whatever era were cheaper than the competitors high end boards at the time that would make the AOpen -BRAND- the el'cheapo brand [wouldn't it] and in order to avoid ""based only on price they may be letting greed and ignorance get the better of them"" you'd have to buy a completely different BRAND, wouldn't you.
-
I'd hardly call G-Luxon "stable electrolyte" caps.
Those recent i915 boards are loaded with G-Luxon.
-
Yeah, AOpen put out a FEW with good caps. - Hit and miss. [chicken 'n egg]
- But the cost point of the board had nothing to do with it.
- "If someone buys based only on price" has nothing to do with it.
AOpen is hit and miss throughout their entire range and they've been that way as long as I can remember.

Now, maybe you've been lucky and have a few pet [favorite] AOpen boards that don't have cap problems [which is fine, everyone has a few favorite 'gem' boards like that] but there are too many counter examples to say AOpen boards without cheap caps is the norm and that includes their high end boards.

To me, OApen is a lot like Antec and Biostar.
They take a good design and more often than not ruin it at build time with cheap parts, but they don't lower their price when they cost-down the product with the cheap parts.
And
Except for a few specific models, they are good as long as you expect it will need a recap when you recieve it. [That's assuming it's a lytic board.]
If it doesn't you simply lucked out.
.
.
I haven't been fond of Asus since socket 7.
Asus is a company that to this day, even though MANY if not most of their boards were affected, has never at any time even admitted ANY cap problems EVER existed. - Further they deliberatly made RMA on their boards that were WELL KNOWN to have caps issues a nightmare all through the socket 370 & 478 eras. [It's not 'our' board: it's your PSU -no- it's your RAM -no- it's your CPU. - An effort to wear out the customer so they give up in frustration and buy a new board.]
Asus's main efforts were in aid of hiding the existance of the problems so their customers didn't find out.
They should have been sued along with with everyone else [many of which admitted the problem, were at least trying to make it right and got sued anyway]. It's a shame Asus wasn't sued because the fact they 'got away with it' has made their customer service attitude even worse than before.
"You bought it, you got it, now go away."
I don't buy Asus but it's not about their board's quality, it's about their companies attitude. It's one thing to have shitty customer service but it's whole magnitude of more shitty when the company knowingly lies to end users.
[That and the fact that up at least into mid socket 775 'era' and the switch to polymer Asus still seemed to think OST lytics were good caps.]
.

**999999999** · 11-19-2009, 08:28 PM

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

The problem with blanket generalizations is so often they are not entirely true or false. Leaving out all other brands of cap and only web searching for AOpen and Sanyo you can find several boards using them.

If you instead want to cite specific models with bad caps, can't the same be said about most if not all manufacturers? Gigabyte and Abit in particular had several bad in the BX era, and neither were using the decent Sanyo caps AOpen did on several.

We tend to see more models in one place with bad caps than most forums would but hasn't AOpen produced a lot of board models over the years?

I've had fairly good results with Asus boards, regardless of your bad CS experiences they have seldom had any bad caps, assuming that is your assertion it seems there is little they can dispute since even if a cap can fail without visible signs, you won't have a large number failing without some visible signs and people noticing the problem, but I think there is another factor associated with board brands.

Often those who pick the cheaper brand are cheaping out on the rest of their system including PSU and case (cooling). These factors can compound the problems with marginal capacitors. There is a middle ground where a board need not have our favorite cap brands and can still have a perfectly adequate lifespan. Same for PSUs, etc,

For what it's worth I have had some Biostar boards with questionable caps that overclocked great and still run fine today (over 5 years later). We can only condemn on a case by case failure basis, some people even claim ECS K7S5A wasn't too bad but I had a 2 foot tall stack of those to throw away at any given moment a few years back.

**PCBONEZ** · 11-20-2009, 12:52 AM

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

I fail to see the difference between citing select models with bad caps and citing select models with Sanyo caps.
- Because there isn't one.

And you've repeated the 'cheaper brand' thing despite the fact the recent AOpen models I picked on were far from the cheaper side of anything.
I can never remember the damned AOpen model numbers so I had to go look.
Does a street price of $280-up in 2005 sound like a cheapskate's board to you?
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article252-page1.html
Does an MSRP of $280-$350 sound like you should see G-Luxon caps on it? - ANYWHERE!
The other board is essentially the same thing only in a full ATX version.

If you specify a time span [vintage] you can make a blanket generalization.
Consistently Good. - Or NOT consistent.
I can't think of any time span were AOpen or Asus were anything except inconsistent when it came to lytic boards. Same for ESC, Biostar, MSI, and Gigabyte. Abit cleaned their act up nicely by about mid socket 478. Supermicro had a few bloopers with socket 603/604 but they seem to have cleaned up.

Not the least bit unusual to see a lytic Asus board with bad or blown caps.
There are literally 100's of examples of bad Asus boards right here in these forums [and in Asus's own forums] from socket 370 thru the entire A7x, A8x, P4x, and P5x model lines. Asus didn't stop occationally using crap lytics until they changed to polymer.
That's not 'fixing', that's ignoring.
AND I DON'T BUY THE IDEA:
- That it's okay to use cheap caps on 'non-deluxe' models of boards.
- THATS CRAP! - But that's what Asus generally does.
As a test of Asus, I bought a brand new Asus Server board back in 2004~2005 figuring they wouldn't dare to use crap caps on a server board, but I was wrong. I resold it on eBay without ever installing it and bought an Intel board. I have better things to do than F** with an unstable server.

Bad Asus models were at least as common as bad Gigabyte or Abit models in the BX era [more correctly, the 'bad electrolyte era'] but unlike the others Asus never admitted there was a problem and, unlike the others, made no effort to make things right with end users.
In more recent history Gigabyte = Asus quality and Abit has been better than either one.
- 'Back in the day' Gigabyte at least tried to 'fix it' and Asus didn't. So if buying new and I'm forced into last resorts and it's down to choosing between Asus and Gigabyte, Gigabyte would win.

Biostar is right down there with Jetway recently [if not as usual]. They've been 'caught' using Sacon FZ [poly look-alike lytic craps by the company formerly called GCS] on motherboards. [As has EVGA both on mobo's and video cards.]
Companies that put that crap on a part are either inept themselves or they are hoping to cheap-out while fooling inept buyers into thinking they are getting good polymer.

Lately for Socket 771 & 775 I choose Abit, Supermicro, or Intel. I have to be in a real fix to achieve some odd hardware combination to step outside of that.
-
I was not a happy camper when I heard Abit dropped out of the mobo business. Fortunately everything around here that matters has been upgraded to Abit, Supermicro, or Intel over the last year and I always buy spares so I probably won't need to go mobo shopping [for me] again for 4 or 5 years. Maybe not even then. Unless something new and fantastic comes out these machines do everything I care to do and the current CPU's are at the low end of what they can handle. I have loads up upgrade room without changing the mobos.
.

Announcement

Fake Panasonic FJ ?

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment