Fake Panasonic FJ ?

[Brian C]

LGA775 mobo from Acer, with suspicious FJ caps ? The rubber seal is just strange. Could it be counterfeit part ?

[Wizard]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

Fake.

Panasonic rubber bung is very unique and very nicely made. Take more pics in detail of this fake caps including vent top.

Cheers, Wizard

[Toasty]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

I opened this in Paint Shop and messed with it a bit. The vent marks look correct, and you can see the end of the line of the date code next to the left hand leg.

What is the date code? Roll that cap over a bit more and show the line of numbers & letters in dark red, heat stamped onto it.

Also, that can has a dent in it. It's now probably bad.

Toast

[Toasty]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

Taken from the engineering draft on the FJ series. The bung does indeed look wrong.
Caveat is that it's a draft and no sheet exists in the "real world" to confirm or deny.

Toast

[370forlife]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

Now OEM's are using counterfeit caps? This mean we are going to have to see if they are not only a good brand, but also not counterfeit?

[Wizard]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

PS, I have looked at lot of capacitors in electronic service, recovering good ones and replacing bad ones (even good ones do go bad eventually.) This capacitor rubber bung design (circular ridges and flat) is not Panasonic's unique design. The engineering drawings and other photos of geniune panny capacitors of these bungs is correctly Panasonic own.

That flat bung with circular ridges is COMMONLY associated with low quality capacitors. I see this on many funny sounding capacitors as well, including Yublight, etc.
Reason for the specially designed bungs are to stand up the capacitors and sit upright correctly before soldering process, and to vent cleaning solution/allow flushing out cleaning stuff. The low quality capacitors that does not have this design sits flat and trap stuff, which is not great thing to begin with.

Occasionally even a good OEM got caught with fakes. But I know Acer is notorious for not looked at closely to keep cost down. Note the similar models by competitors are bit expensive (around 20 to 150 dollars difference?). That how it is, and I have taken apart Acer equipment (notebooks, LCD monitors, LCD TV, etc.) Signicifent lower quality, not as durable casings, poorly filters on power planes in PSUs and mainboards as such (causes intermittent BSODs, memory corruptions, data losses, etc, not as long life) and not as engineered vs samsung, Toshiba, Sanyo etc.

For this reason I refuse to own Acer stuff. Same with ECS, Biostar, MSI (some are bad, some is good, have to know which) and like as well. Sorry. I had sour discoveries when I was inspecting the pulled mainboards.

Very small value capacitors leads are always pre-formed so they sit proud above circuit boards since the bung is too small to allow this and lead spacing is so narrow that drilled holes on mainboard is not ideal. That is same reasons low quality boards utilize this incorrect practice by sitting those small caps right on circuit board via so small lead spacing drilled holes.

Cheers, Wizard

[Brian C]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

The DATE CODE:


The TOP VENT:

[linuxguru]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

The bung screams fake, but the date code and vent are consistent with some Panasonic FLs that I pulled out of an Asus mobo. Maybe it's some cost-reduced FJ built specifically for Acer - certainly very odd.

[gdement]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

I remember somebody posting pictures of Samxon engineering samples that had a cheap bung in them. Maybe Acer used FJ samples in manufacturing? That seems unlikely though.

[370forlife]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

May be specially made for acer, though who is the maker of that motherboard?

The purple kind of says ECS, which I wouldn't be surprised if they were fake panny's.

[gdement]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

It seems to me that a major manufacturer wouldn't have any reason to end up with fake caps - if they're big enough then they ought to be sourcing from the manufacturer directly. Not saying it doesn't happen but I don't get why it would.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

Acer is AOpen. I think they still make their own boards.
They've been into the pretty colors thing for a while now.
Acer/AOpen has always gone cheap. All the way back to 486.

[Brian C]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

Is FJZ an improved version of FJ ? Below is the picture of Panasonic FJZ series ( from MSI K8N-Neo4 ).

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

That's the rumor but I haven't seen anything official.

[ant3202]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

the First picture... looks so fake.

FJZ is sort of funny... i gonna de solder it and check out one of the board soon

[kc8adu]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

could they be made under license by a 3rd party? a datasheet from matsushita would clear up some of this.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

FJ and FL have no publicly [officially] released datasheets.
[I know you know, just sayin' for new people.]
-
I think those series are intended to be sold only direct to manufacturers [Asus, Intel, Gigabyte, and so on] and aren't sold through normal distribution networks.
I suspect all those seen for sale are the result of over-stock or old-stock buy outs.
- That would at least explain not publicizing the datasheets.
.

As a side thought.
I don't recall Panasonic ever having a low ESR cap without using gold either as the sleeve or the printing.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

Now OEM's are using counterfeit caps? This mean we are going to have to see if they are not only a good brand, but also not counterfeit?

I think Soyo was doing that.
On some boards they had silver sleeved OST, Sacon, Evercon, and Capsun branded caps ALL with the EXACT same colors and ALL an oddity in the way the vent stamp was done which suggested they ALL came off the same assembly line.
To further support my suspicion, one [some?] of the boards had silver sleeved caps marked OST RLX in can sizes that don't exist in the RLX datasheet.
.
Pretty sad when they're counterfeiting OST!
.

[c_hegge]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

I recently pulled some Panny FJ caps of another Acer Motherboard. they look identical to the caps in the first pictures on this thread, with that same suspect rubber seal. I'm glad I found this thread before I got to re-use them.

[999999999]

Re: Fake Panasonic FJ ?

I doubt they are counterfeit, major board manufacturers order in enough quantity they could have Panasonic make the bung different.

Acer has been cheap on some things, but traditionally AOPEN has used some quality caps, for example during the BX era when caps were popping left and right on generics and even Abit's boards, AOpen was one of the few that used a large amount of Sanyo caps... just ignore where the author of the linked article calls them Tantalum as they were std. low ESR 'lytics.
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=663