Does replacing bad cap give much of a performance boost?

[cufarmer]

Re: Does replacing bad cap give much of a performance boost?

Zat right.
I'm a Retired Electronics Tech. My specialty was electronic control systems for Nuclear Power plants.
I was also a Certified Nuclear Reactor Operator and I retired as a QA Inspector.
Did PC's on the side since '95 and since retiring [10 years ago] I've been doing actual -component- level repair on motherboards.
I got into it because it's easy compared to what I used to do.
-
You come off like a typical 'board swapper' tech. That's fine but that's not what we do here.
We actually fix the boards. That's our 'thing'.
-
If you actually think a A cool heatsink is a -definite- indication that the cooling fan is doing its job then we have teenagers here you should be listening to because they know more at component level than you do.
.

Thats nice. I'm a plumber and I have an AA in IT. I have not been doing this very long at all, and yes, I am a "board swapper".

I dont think it takes nuclear science degrees and reactor experience to work on these things, but I do value yalls experience. If some one's journey in the computer industry (even 25 years worth) never takes them in this direction, it does not mean thier education and experience is worth less than another's as a whole (in my opinion).

Interesting topic though.

[ben7]

Re: Does replacing bad cap give much of a performance boost?

No... but it prevents your board from dying entirely. However, if you were experiencing random crashes, replacing the blown caps should fix that.

Almost a year ago my Moms computer started to get unstable, and randomly crash. Also, a year before we had put more ram into the computer to help speed it up, but it had gotten slow again. So then i found out there were 4 bad Nichicon HN caps right on the cpu power bus, no wonder why it would crash so much! Replaced with KZE and all is well again! Of course then I looked into the bad capacitor stuff on the web, and found this site!

-Ben

[JarettM]

Re: Does replacing bad cap give much of a performance boost?

in a way it CAN be true. If you have a bad cap giving your CPU too much juice and causing it to run hotter...some motherboard are set to downthrottle if the CPU gets hot. so in SOME instances it can increase performance...by fixing a larger problem

a majority of the caps on a motherboard aren't working the way you think they're working.

capacitors work as storage with DC, but can act as a short to AC. most of the caps on a motherboard that you're seeing are used as filtering, i.e. taking out noise, voltage spikes, etc. from the different signals running around a motherboard. the traces are so close together, "noise on the lines" is highly probable. we don't want that, because those spikes or noise can be seen as data, or it can throw a frequency off by quite a bit, causing instability.

now, the part about "giving your CPU too much juice"... that's going to be in the power supply. those caps will be used as hold-up caps... if there's a drop in input voltage, these caps will let a little "juice" out to keep the output voltage at nominal.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Does replacing bad cap give much of a performance boost?

now, the part about "giving your CPU too much juice"... that's going to be in the power supply. those caps will be used as hold-up caps... if there's a drop in input voltage, these caps will let a little "juice" out to keep the output voltage at nominal.

unless its BAD. One thing you can get from a bad cap (depending on what kind of circuit its in) is too much voltage bleed. dosen't necessarily apply to vrm caps since most of them are in parallel