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  • solid capacitors

    Solid capacitors are a welcome feature on most manufacturers motherboards, Asus being no exception. When checking specs of various Asus boards to find one suitable for my requirements, I noticed the proud boast that their solid caps had a 5K hour expected lifespan. That's just over 208 days. I would rather stick with the old electrolytics which usually lasted at least 5 years. Seems that Asus employ overpaid monkeys in their marketing department.

  • #2
    Re: solid capacitors

    The 5K hour spec is a minimum lifetime spec, and if done right, it is done at 105C ambient temperature. So that's a minimum of 5K hours at 105C.

    I doubt the testing and life span specs of solid and electrolytic capacitors is different. Do we know the life span spec for the various electrolytic capacitors used on mother boards?

    Yes, one year is 8760 hours, so 5000 hours seems short. ASRock is using 12K hour solid capacitors on some of their newer boards, which would seem to be less than 1.5 years. Again that spec is the minimum at 105C (221F), which I doubt any capacitors on our boards ever endure for very long, if ever.

    We know that capacitor quality, particularly electrolytic capacitors, varies quite a bit. PC power supply quality is partially determined by the manufacture of its electrolytic capacitors and their temperature rating.

    Marketing departments are given numbers that I imagine in most cases they do not really understand, and are tasked with surrounding those numbers with flashy looking pictures. I always laugh at a recent marketing page for a mother board that compared something on the new board with an older board. The new board had a happy, smiling face next to whatever was being touted as better, while the other board had a sad, frowning face next to it. That sure convinced me it was better!

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    • #3
      Re: solid capacitors

      I just looked at the motherboard box for my Gigabyte and it says "all 50000 hour solid capacitors".

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      • #4
        Re: solid capacitors

        Meanwhile, a new Gigabyte GA-Z97X-SOC Force board has 10K hour solid caps:

        GIGABYTE - Motherboard - Socket 1150 - GA-Z97X-SOC Force (rev. 1.0)

        Since this board is one of their Ultra Durable series models, wouldn't it have the best parts?

        A hour spec for the caps is worthless without the temperature spec. Many of us have old mother boards with mainly if not all electrolytic caps, that still work fine.

        I could swear my old Gigabyte socket 775 board was supposed to have 50,000 hour caps too.

        This comment is not aimed at any manufacture. We can find marketing info on some current boards that tout the thickness of the gold plating on the CPU socket pins, memory slot and PCIe slot contacts. I'm not saying that is false, but how would anyone ever verify these claims to be true?

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        • #5
          Re: solid capacitors

          I would certainly get worried if my motherboards ran at over 40C, hopefully more like 32C at the moment. Iv'e just looked into a relatives pc, and there is one electrolytic bulging on the motherboard and another in the psu (Asrock/Tagan 2006). He has decided to run them till they fail, hopefully not in flames.

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          • #6
            Re: solid capacitors

            Iv'e just looked at the top motherboards from Asus, Asrock and Gigabyte and they have one thing in common, electrolytic capacitors on the audio side. I'm glad I didn't bet against it as I would have lost.

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            • #7
              Re: solid capacitors

              Originally posted by 939er View Post
              Iv'e just looked at the top motherboards from Asus, Asrock and Gigabyte and they have one thing in common, electrolytic capacitors on the audio side. I'm glad I didn't bet against it as I would have lost.
              That's an audiophile thing, the type of capacitors used for certain applications affect the sound. Some capacitors sound better than others.

              Otherwise certain kinds of plastic film capacitors (polypropylene) are used for optimal sound. But they are physically very large for their capacitance value and would never fit on a PC mother board. They are also very expensive. Solid type capacitors are not considered to sound good compared to certain high quality electrolytic caps.

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