Categories
Hardware

Bad Capacitors

A few weeks ago, one of my work PC’s decided to just died on me. It was able to reboot but crashed late in the boot process. Eventually it turned out that one of the video cards (NVIDIA Geforce4 MX4000) went bad. Pulled the card and I just threw it on a shelf. The other day I looked at it and noticed 4 of the 5 capacitors on it actually vented. I took a few quick pictures of the carnage. You’ll likely want to go to the real high resolution pics to see the detail.

The alarming thing about this is that capacitors are found in a very widespread range of products. That’s why backups are important when you have critical systems.