Fakes on ECS P4M800PRO-M V1.0?

[lbwlow]

Hi all...
Salvaged yet another board from a local scrapper, those bad caps were hiding under the HSF, well yea... I missed it. These caps they looks fake solids to me, because it has the vents mark on them. All of them were vented and their guts were shoot onto the HSF. But amazingly the board still works and pass memtest86 like no issue. What is the manufacture of these caps ? I never seen one of these before other than the Sacon FZ series. I got a bag of random solid caps that I salvaged from other dead board, gonna put those over here.

[ReeceyBurger123]

Re: Fakes on ECS P4M800PRO-M V1.0?

Looks like rust to me no electrolyte, have you esr'd them ?

[Wester547]

Re: Fakes on ECS P4M800PRO-M V1.0?

Those aren't solid capacitors. Those are wet electrolytics. Supposedly made by Suncon (Sanyo) but if you desolder them you will probably find that they have a bullseye bung so I have my doubts of their authenticity (however I think that 10mm and shorter capacitors sometimes tend to have a flat bung in place of a thicker one, at least that's what Sanyo notes about their OS-CON SEPC series in the datasheet)... and those 680uF/4V series of capacitors yield a high failure rate anyway.

[ZnsaneRyder]

Re: Fakes on ECS P4M800PRO-M V1.0?

Glad you have some replacement caps.

I question the integrity of all caps in boards, they could have blown for any reason.


On an old overclocked gaming computer I use to have, I actually added Three 3300uf caps under the motherboard in soldered in parallel to the pins with the caps on top. My PC case had room under the motherboard however. In a situation you can not find the right caps, you can do that too, just find some large electrolytics that are small enough to fit under the board, lay them down against the board, bend the legs on the capacitors to touch the board, and solder them in.

[Agent24]

Re: Fakes on ECS P4M800PRO-M V1.0?

Those aren't solid capacitors. Those are wet electrolytics.

Yeah. They just have a very similar can style, but as you see, the vent gives them away.

I don't know if replacing them with real solid capacitors is a good idea. Those have much lower ESR and may upset VRM stability.

Research the posts on Polymodding first.

[lbwlow]

Re: Fakes on ECS P4M800PRO-M V1.0?

Looks like rust to me no electrolyte, have you esr'd them ?

I have no idea what are those rusty like goo, it wasn't complete dry, and it sticks. I don't have a ESR in hand, so I just use the capacitance function on my DMM to test those caps, although they are rated at 680uf, but I am getting a reading of closing to 1000uf, and it wasn't stable, like... fluctuate between 700-900uf. But as far as I can tell, those caps are bulged, it won't stays flat when I lay it against the floor.

Those aren't solid capacitors. Those are wet electrolytics. Supposedly made by Suncon (Sanyo) but if you desolder them you will probably find that they have a bullseye bung so I have my doubts of their authenticity (however I think that 10mm and shorter capacitors sometimes tend to have a flat bung in place of a thicker one, at least that's what Sanyo notes about their OS-CON SEPC series in the datasheet)... and those 680uF/4V series of capacitors yield a high failure rate anyway.

Okay, thanks for the clarification, I will check those caps once again to confirm if it is made by Suncon.

Glad you have some replacement caps.

I question the integrity of all caps in boards, they could have blown for any reason.


On an old overclocked gaming computer I use to have, I actually added Three 3300uf caps under the motherboard in soldered in parallel to the pins with the caps on top. My PC case had room under the motherboard however. In a situation you can not find the right caps, you can do that too, just find some large electrolytics that are small enough to fit under the board, lay them down against the board, bend the legs on the capacitors to touch the board, and solder them in.

Yeah. They just have a very similar can style, but as you see, the vent gives them away.

I don't know if replacing them with real solid capacitors is a good idea. Those have much lower ESR and may upset VRM stability.

Research the posts on Polymodding first.

I am guessing they were blown due to extreme heat radiated from the HSF, it came with a P4 506 processor. If smart fan was enabled in the BIOS setting, the heatsink is extremely hot, the surrounding area under the board is very hot as well, unless smart fan function is disabled.

Well... it was lucky that this board doesn't has any caps under it.

Now I have replace those faulty caps with yellow color Fujitsu Polymer 2.5V caps, so far so good, only weird thing was, if I was using IDE HDD with IDE-SATA adapter, the PC would runs extremely slow, and even BSOD, when running the IDE HDD with IDE cable, it runs fine with no issue whatsoever.

[Wester547]

Re: Fakes on ECS P4M800PRO-M V1.0?

I have no idea what are those rusty like goo, it wasn't complete dry, and it sticks. I don't have a ESR in hand, so I just use the capacitance function on my DMM to test those caps, although they are rated at 680uf, but I am getting a reading of closing to 1000uf, and it wasn't stable, like... fluctuate between 700-900uf. But as far as I can tell, those caps are bulged, it won't stays flat when I lay it against the floor.

That means they've gone leaky (partially shorted). My guess is that when the electrolyte broke down, dried up, and outgassed (a process expedited by the aforementioned heat for sure), it was no longer capable of proving the aluminum oxide film with enough oxygen to self-heal (reform) so defects in the dielectric essentially went uncorrected for too long.

I am guessing they were blown due to extreme heat radiated from the HSF, it came with a P4 506 processor. If smart fan was enabled in the BIOS setting, the heatsink is extremely hot, the surrounding area under the board is very hot as well, unless smart fan function is disabled.

Yes, please disable retarded "cooling systems" like that. ECS must have been very eager to bake even the best liquid electrolytics with such "cooling". That board looks to be loaded with crap anyway (OST and Toshin Kogyo). And yes, it looks like the heatsink fan was blowing that heat right across the capacitors.

Now I have replace those faulty caps with yellow color Fujitsu Polymer 2.5V caps, so far so good, only weird thing was, if I was using IDE HDD with IDE-SATA adapter, the PC would runs extremely slow, and even BSOD, when running the IDE HDD with IDE cable, it runs fine with no issue whatsoever.

It probably means A) something is wrong with the card itself or B) the board is loaded with bad capacitors that could result in issues with add-in cards.

[Agent24]

Re: Fakes on ECS P4M800PRO-M V1.0?

I have tried those IDE-SATA drive converters too. The ones I had hated AHCI\RAID and would only work with the SATA controller in legacy IDE emulation mode. Also they did not work with optical drives at all. But I am talking ultra budget ones for like $2 on eBay. You can get much better looking and more expensive ones which I'm sure work much better.

If the board runs fine with direct IDE connection I would blame the converters.