Polymer's on mainboards, new trend?

[MD Willington]

Aparently EVGA, the company that makes video cards, is making NF3 & 4 mainboards...

http://www.evga.com/articles/public.asp?AID=239

They have chosen polymer caps over "plain-ol-jelly-bean" electrolytics...

This is what they say about them.

Capacitors are one of the most important items on your motherboard - and it has a lot of them. They are used to filter the power supply lines (the +12, -12, +5, -5, +5VSB, and +3.3 lines) to keep noise down and they are also used by the motherboard's switching regulators that provide the power given to the CPU.

Since the capacitors are in one way or another responsible for powering every single item on, or attached, to your motherboard, it makes sense to use the best ones possible.

The EVGA 115-K8-NF31-AX uses Polymer Based capacitors rather than the cheaper and more popular Electrolytic Based capacitors. This means that on our capacitors, the Mean-Time-Between-Failures is greater than 10 years - while Electrolytic capacitors tend to begin failing after only about 2 years. Ours are also rated at 105 degrees C rather than the standard 85 degrees. This means that they make less heat and can withstand more, keeping even the hottest of motherboards stable.

I know Panasonic, Rubycon & Nichicon make polymer caps...Your thoughts on EVGA's shift to polymer??

MD

[Topcat]

The EVGA 115-K8-NF31-AX uses Polymer Based capacitors rather than the cheaper and more popular Electrolytic Based capacitors. This means that on our capacitors, the Mean-Time-Between-Failures is greater than 10 years - while Electrolytic capacitors tend to begin failing after only about 2 years. Ours are also rated at 105 degrees C rather than the standard 85 degrees. This means that they make less heat and can withstand more, keeping even the hottest of motherboards stable.

I've NEVER seen a motherboard using 85* caps, EVER. That's BS right there. I've also never seen a motherboard have capacitor failures in 2 years when using proven lytics, such as Rubycon. The recent Nichicon HM series failures are the exception to this, however, most high-end capacitors live well beyond the motherboard's useful lifetime.

All the same, I'd like to get my hands on one of these and put a scope on it, and see how clean the various rails are using the polymer caps.

[kc8adu]

high end boards use these caps and have been for a long while.
thats those purple or blue sanyo os cons.
i save them whenever i scrap a board that has them.

[MD Willington]

I though I read a bit of bovine effluent when I was reading that and got a bit of a chuckle...85*C...LOL.

I agree with good caps lasting longer than 2 years...

I just received a Sante-Fe KM mainboard (socket 462)...All Chemi-con LXV's in the power section, those are Sanyo's IIRC, it's quite old since it only has a KT133 chipset (2x100 FSB)...

Anything to make a buck I guess...

Hopefully more companies will take this route...the Abit deal may be scaring them a little...

MD

[RJARRRPCGP]

high end boards use these caps and have been for a long while.
thats those purple or blue sanyo os cons.
i save them whenever i scrap a board that has them.

I have those for caps on my eVGA GeForce 4 Ti4200 64 MB!!!! Cool!!!!

[willawake]

who is doing the oem for evga?

looks like a nice board. hope they stick to 100% polymers, it is a good marketing point. pity about the marketing material though, should have passed it by the technical dept.

it is a curious looking board though. smaller than the others of the same chipset, looking a bit crowded but still functional.

compare it to the gigabyte board. look at the damn smt components on that, packed.
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1612
have the polymer caps eliminated a lot of the smt components for the evga board?