Re: For those that swear by KZG...

Here's a shot of my Asus A7N8X board. I bought it new in the box about two years ago. It suddenly died about 3 months ago. Inspection revealed that seven of the eight 3300 ufd KZG capacitors were buldging. The other capacitors on the board are OST RLX except for two Rubycon MBZ's, all of which look OK. I recently bought a used A7N8X that has MBZ's instead of the KZG's. Otherwise it's the same. It seems to work OK. I can't find any date code on the board or its box that might indicate when Asus changed vendors....

Re: Average lifespan of a polymer capacitor?

That's not very comforting. There's 8765 hours in a year so it sounds like if you leave it running, you should expect it to fail in about six months. I'd really expect 50,000 hour minimum for a consumer product. Maybe even 100,000 hours....

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Greetings from Santa Barbara.

A rash of electronic failures prompted me to start searching, which led me to this site. I was unaware of the capacitor plague issue before this.

1. About two years ago my Asus A7V8X based system died. I bought it new around 2003 and it had plugged away, first with an Athlon XP2000+ and later with a Sempron 3000+, without any issues. I don't see any bulged capacitors but am wondering if that's what's wrong.

2. I replaced the A7V8X with an A7N8X, basically Asus's...