First post, by nemail
Hi
I've been desoldering all the caps from a GA-586HX2 and an Asus P/I-P55T2P4 and they are all around 6.3V or 10V, 330uF or 1000uF and they all measure around 0.5 Ohms ESR according to my cheap Chinesium "Multi-function Tester - TC1". Some of the Asus's caps give very strange readings (either 5 Ohms ESR and WAY lower capacity or one even gets detected as a diode 🤣), so I assume they are dead. I consider the readings of that tester somewhat usable.
Now the problem: you can't really get off-the-shelf caps with these parameters, which are NOT low-ESR. Parametric search of mouser.com gives me only low ESR types as soon as I narrow down to basic things like diameter of 8mm, pin spacing of 3.5mm and 1000uF of capacity at at least 10V. Some may have like 0.16 Ohms but non of them get in the range of 0.5 Ohms ESR.
I don't really want to buy another bunch of chinesium branded caps, I guess on ebay or aliexpress or whatever one could source non-low-ESR types, but I was wondering whether any of you have replaced caps which originally weren't low-ESR with low-ESR types and what your experiences were.
I know that usually you WANT low ESR in most cases, but I also know that under certain circumstances like with some LDO voltage regulators and some types of switching voltage regulators and even more components, low-ESR caps can lead to instabilities. So I was wondering what types of caps y'all are using for recapping your boards and whether you even bothered to pay attention to low-ESR or not (I know ofc if the original ones are low-ESR, you should replace them with low-ESR ones).
Thanks!
edit: OR, are these 0.5 Ohm caps all toast in the first place and caps with that high ESR never existed? 😳