sudden rash of psu with VERY BAD soldering

[kc8adu]

just got several liteon and one thermaltake psu with more ring cracks than i could count.
the liteon were in cheap hp p4 boxes and all were missing +3.3
the thermaltake is a 420w with a-pfc.
very heavy and packed like sardines inside.a new employee at the store had his box in today and it would randomly reboot.just bumping the bench or plugging in a usb hdd would trigger a reboot.
told him to pull the psu.
tore it apart and along with bulging jenpo and teapo caps was the biggest collection of busted solder joints i have ever seen!
i literally resoldered every joint in it.replaced all the caps with panasonic fm 4700@6.3 and a 3300@16 fc on +12.
started with 1v p-p on +5 and 1.2v p-p on +5
+12 was showing 10.8v dc and a whopping 6v p-p of trash!
everything is down to a few mv now.

[Shroomie]

Re: sudden rash of psu with VERY BAD soldering

Oh dear...So it's not just the caps we have to watch out for.

The Liteons don't shock me - supposedly a good brand but HP is known for demanding the cheapest and hiring monkeys who can't solder (not meant to be racist, referring to their incompetency) is one way for Liteon to meet this...

Nice to know that Jen Po is a confirmed bad brand, also.

[PeteS in CA]

Re: sudden rash of psu with VERY BAD soldering

Lite On isn't going to set up a special line just to manufacture junk. They would just use their high-volume line with fairly large runs. Are the failed units RoHS-compliant? I wonder if the soldering machine wasn't hot enough for good solder flow.

[Spacedye69]

Re: sudden rash of psu with VERY BAD soldering

I would think in the near future, there will be problems with bad solder joints while everyone converts to RoHS comliance and gets the high production bugs out. Works for me. Solder is cheaper than caps! BadSolder.net.

[Super Nade]

Re: sudden rash of psu with VERY BAD soldering

Wow! I thought lite-on were top drawer manufacturers? There were no cracks or bad solder joints on my Supermicro PWS0056.

[Oklahoma Wolf]

Re: sudden rash of psu with VERY BAD soldering

BadSolder.net.

Ah, the stories I could tell on such a forum... like the haunted $12,000 Galanti church organ that needed every single CPU board resoldered. Now that thing was a pain to service

Back to topic, I certainly hope this isn't typical of Lite-On... I was really getting to like them.

[kc8adu]

Re: sudden rash of psu with VERY BAD soldering

Lite On isn't going to set up a special line just to manufacture junk. They would just use their high-volume line with fairly large runs. Are the failed units RoHS-compliant? I wonder if the soldering machine wasn't hot enough for good solder flow.

i didnt notice the no pb stickers if they were.i know they arent rohs now!

[gonzo0815]

Re: sudden rash of psu with VERY BAD soldering

May be they experiemted a bit if they could use their old equipment to produce the cheap monkey stuf in ROHS quality too. But any way, all manufakturere have to change to rohs, therefore they are running probably some testbatches, without stating it Rohs compilant. But i guess you would have noticed it during resoldering, if the solder is actually leed free. As the optimal soldering temperature window isn`t that large with rohs, i think this could happen more often in future, untill they realize that they have to pay at least one non monkey all the time which stoops the batch if tjhere is something wrong.