cracked tantalum cap on a video card. safe to apply power without fireworks?

[ChaosLegionnaire]

please refer to the attached pics. is it safe to apply power with that tantalum cap like that without causing fireworks? i dont wanna burn a hole through the pcb as the gpu chip is on the other side.

happened to me once before with a shorted mlcc. shorted mlcc on a vrm power phase burned a hole through the pcb power section but thankfully that was nowhere near the gpu chip. but the video card still ended up in the landfill anyway tho as the burn-through was not fixable.

so do let me know what u think of the chipped tantalum there. thanks.

[sam_sam_sam]

Replace all of them first then replace any other capacitors that are not well known good quality capacitors then try powering it up and see what happens next

[PeteS in CA]

Having seen PWAs with several layers burned through due to a tantalum cap that had an incendiary event, I would replace it and every other damaged tantalum cap on that PWA. If that PWA was built in mid 20011, I'm surprised tantalum capacitors were used. Sun Microsystems started eliminating tantalum capacitors from its products in the mid 1990s (when a $0.50 or $1.00 cap burns and emits smoking, shutting down a large data center, it gets customers POed. I just looked over several modern server MBs and saw zero tantalum and lots of polymer capacitors.