Reply 40 of 65, by shamino
- Rank
- l33t
If you find something super cheap then of course it makes sense to just grab it and figure out the details later. But as the price increases, you'll obviously start to be more selective about what you really want.
I disagree with the notion that boards are so hard to find that someone should just buy the first thing they see. You still have choices, and every week you'll find different things for sale.
I agree that price and availability are major criteria when shopping for anything. But we can't evaluate those things here because nobody knows what you will find at a given time and place.
Only the buyer can weigh the price of whatever they find against how well they think it will suit them. But to do that, they need to have information to base their decision on.
The only useful thing we can do here is discuss how well different boards might suit your needs. Reliability of the capacitors is one of the criteria that could factor into this, just like picking a favorite chipset or anything else.
How much weight to put on the quality of the capacitors depends how comfortable you are with replacing them. If you will be collecting other motherboards or old electronics of any kind, it's valuable to gain this skill. But if you'd rather avoid the issue, then it pays to know which boards are less likely to be affected by it.
HanSolo wrote on 2023-08-09, 10:26:The capacitor plague affected capacitors produced in the years from 1999 on. Many Slot 1 boards are older and many companies were affected. Abit was only more prominent in the media. And they went out of business because of shady management practices. At least that's my knowledge about that part of history 😀
Now it all doesn't really matter because any 25 year old board can have bad caps."
The problem of bad caps in the P3 era is widespread, but it's not so generic as to treat all brands as the same. Some brands had much less exposure to it because they were more conservative about who they bought their parts from. Among those that took a chance, ABit was especially unlucky.
I doubt you could find a single ABit 440BX board that doesn't have bad caps. They seemed to have a deal with a single cap supplier (Jackcon) which turned out to be among the most guaranteed to fail caps ever made. Most other brands at least had a lottery, where you might get a 2nd tier brand cap that held up.
I doubt you could find a single Intel slot-1 board with bad caps. They're obnoxiously large, conservative, older series caps that were already known reliable at the time.
Most other brands lie between those extremes.
It would be very hard to find an Asus 440BX with bad caps either. They used more modern series than Intel, but they were from the top tier manufacturers and have all proven to be good.
All these capacitors are old now, but age has not neutralized the issue. Quality caps are still far less likely to be faulty, even today.
Asus isn't perfect. Their P2L97 (440LX) was probably the most famous example of boards that used an onboard 3.3V regulator that couldn't supply the amount of current that AGP standards required.
But by the time of 440BX that issue was resolved for most brands, it's mostly just a 440LX era problem. The P2L97 also has cheap caps on it, surprisingly, but they aren't commonly known to fail. It seems Asus switched to quality caps at exactly the right time.
Capacitors are not the only factor to consider, but if you hope to avoid messing with them then their quality shouldn't be ignored. You might also put weight on the slot configuration, or tweaking options, or what CPUs it can run.
To put it another way - if you find an ABit, an EpoX, and an Asus for similar prices, you can either have reasons to prefer one over the other, or you can just be guessing. 😀
