Disconnected capacitors?

[Tom41]

While tidying up my server room, I put an old PSU into a box containing the CPU boards from my old server, and pushed it down hard until it went into the box . This caused one of the caps on that board to break off and another to become loose.

It was only then that I took a closer look at the board. It doesn't seem to have ANY traces going to either of the capacitors that came loose! I checked both sides of the board, where the caps are soldered in - no traces visible.

Is it possible they forgot to put the traces in the board silkscreen before printing it? Why put caps on the board if they're not going to be connected to anything?

It's also possible that the board contains an extra layer inside, which the caps are connected to. I can only see the traces on the front and back of the board, but there may well be another PCB layer sandwiched between the front and back.

Thankfully, I'll never be using those CPU boards again (unless I come across another Compaq Proliant of the same type), so it's not a big loss. Any comments?

[tvtech]

Re: Disconnected capacitors?

Yep its prolly a multi-layer pcb with the ground plane and the supply plane being sandwitched in the pcb,if you hold it up to a bright light sometimes you can see the other traces in the sandwitch,I highly doubt that a manuf would put a useless component on the board.