[chrsmth]

Are bad capacitors common? I bought a brand new motherboard over the holidays, and one of the capacitors appeared to be leaking [1]. I went back to get it exchanged and the experience was interesting.

The representative initially agreed that the capacitor was bad. He grabbed a new board, pulled it out of the bag, and literally the same problem. Same capacitor even, which was unfortunate for me because the new determination was that maybe they're supposed to be like that? They had a tech in the store who claimed that it was residue from some kind of "conformal coating", and that 7/10 boards have capacitors that look like that. Somehow the residue is biased to appear directly under the capacitors, but that wasn't exactly explained. He also claimed that capacitors don't leak, at least the type on this board.

Eventually I just asked for one of the 3/10 boards that didn't have that residue, and the store was gracious enough to do that for me, but insisted that there was no issue the whole way.

They had to flip through 4 boards before finding one without residue under any capacitors, and I still don't know if I was being unreasonable.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/G69ypcv.jpg

[asddubs]

well, it certainly looks like the cap leaked. new caps don't usually do that even if they're crap. It's also interesting that it was the same one each time, seeing as how all those caps are identical. i do think you made the right call, if it was some sort of glue to prevent vibration, it would be on all of them (it's definitely not conformal coating)

[chrsmth]

Thanks, yeah it is strange that the same capacitor leaked on both boards. Actually there was a second capacitor on my first "bad" board that might have also been leaking, but I never pictured it. It was less obvious. Also, I only saw 2 "bad" boards myself, so maybe it's just coincidence.

A friend thought maybe that capacitor was getting squeezed during production, or the board is just designed such that that capacitor is more likely to fail.

[asddubs]

yeah that was my thought too, some sort of mechanical issue during assembly that's puncturing the can in a way you can't see, maybe

[virgulino]

I could be wrong, but I think these are solid capacitors, they don't leak.

https://www.gigabyte.com/webpage/8/article_02_all_solid.htm

[chrsmth]

You certainly could be right. I don't know too much about capacitors, but from what I'm seeing it looks like it could also be a "Hybrid polymer capacitor" [1], which would have some liquid in it [2]. This is also an MSI board.

[1] https://www.digikey.ca/en/products/filter/aluminum-polymer-c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_capacitor