This is the first time that I've seen an Panasonic cap fail that wasn't installed backwards (at least that I can remember).
It's a 1800uF 6.3V part. It's from a Dell Optiplex 780 SFF from 2010. CPU is a Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16GHz. It was a point of sales machine at a car dealership and was NEVER off! It was on a UPS, and had 82,156 hours on it when I got it. It had never been cleaned, never had the thermal paste replaced. The thing literally just worked for 10 years. It's a cool machine because it's one of the highest end Core 2 Duo CPUs with DDR3 RAM
I got the machine in August 2020. I took it apart and saw that the board had 9 KZG caps on the board, none looked bulged. I took apart the PSU (total PITA, by the way) and saw a bulged CapXon. After taking apart the power supply, I discovered that there was only the one 2200uF 16V CapXon GF for all of the 12V rail filtering. I'm guessing after that bulged, the 12V ripple was really high. I replaced all of the KZG on the board and did a full recap on the PSU (including the primary cap!) and replaced the thermal paste on the CPU and Northbridge heatsink. I instantly started using the machine as a Plex media player in August 2020. I set it up to run 24/7.
The original GPU fan on the ATi video card failed in December 2020 and I replaced it. At that point, the cap was still good.
I shut down the computer to move in June 2021 and I noticed that the cap was failed. So at the minimum, it still ran for 85,0000 hours in a small low airflow case directly in line of CPU exhaust heat. Not bad! The same size/series caps next to it tested perfectly in spec. I was worried at first that the PSU didn't like my recap and was outputting high ripple but it makes more sense that it just had a long stressful life.
Here is a picture after I recapped it so you can have a good idea of where the cap was:
It's a 1800uF 6.3V part. It's from a Dell Optiplex 780 SFF from 2010. CPU is a Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16GHz. It was a point of sales machine at a car dealership and was NEVER off! It was on a UPS, and had 82,156 hours on it when I got it. It had never been cleaned, never had the thermal paste replaced. The thing literally just worked for 10 years. It's a cool machine because it's one of the highest end Core 2 Duo CPUs with DDR3 RAM
I got the machine in August 2020. I took it apart and saw that the board had 9 KZG caps on the board, none looked bulged. I took apart the PSU (total PITA, by the way) and saw a bulged CapXon. After taking apart the power supply, I discovered that there was only the one 2200uF 16V CapXon GF for all of the 12V rail filtering. I'm guessing after that bulged, the 12V ripple was really high. I replaced all of the KZG on the board and did a full recap on the PSU (including the primary cap!) and replaced the thermal paste on the CPU and Northbridge heatsink. I instantly started using the machine as a Plex media player in August 2020. I set it up to run 24/7.
The original GPU fan on the ATi video card failed in December 2020 and I replaced it. At that point, the cap was still good.
I shut down the computer to move in June 2021 and I noticed that the cap was failed. So at the minimum, it still ran for 85,0000 hours in a small low airflow case directly in line of CPU exhaust heat. Not bad! The same size/series caps next to it tested perfectly in spec. I was worried at first that the PSU didn't like my recap and was outputting high ripple but it makes more sense that it just had a long stressful life.
Here is a picture after I recapped it so you can have a good idea of where the cap was:
Attached Files
Notice there are only 4 of those Panasonic (FL or FJS) 1800 uF caps total filtering the CPU output... and the CPU is an Athlon II X4 - not exactly light on power usage. The board has space for 6 caps total (so 2 empty spots.) Probably HP decided to be cheap and cut some corners... which made the 4 installed ones have to work harder... and probably why one of them failed. At least that's my guess to why it failed, but I could be wrong too.
No discredit was intended to Panasonic. It did its job and then some. Heat aside - I bet it wouldn't have popped if that CapXon was a quality brand from day one. My company was going to give this to a local company to melt down... I like that better than the dumpster, but still couldn't let it happen. It's been running like a champ ever since I replaced that cap.
nVidia RTX 3080 TI, Corsair RM750I.
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