Radical Vision wrote:

Wester547 wrote:

The bulging capacitors on that DFI board actually appear to be G-Luxon (the LY series?), one of the most notoriously unreliable brands from the “capacitor plague” days. Fortunately, at least one of the boards appears to use decent capacitors in the CPU VRM area (Rubycon ZL).

All of the brands that are not Japan ones are proven junk.... Of course with some small exceptions....

There are alot, and I mean alot of American and other none japanese companies that make good caps.
Infact you hardly see anyone use Japanese caps in vintage speakers or 50/60s tube amps. Large scale military grade and caps used by the power companies are almost always made in American or in Europe. Its the Chinese caps you have to look out for

Illinois, Kemet, Cornell. Even some Taiwanese brands like Teapo and Taicon are okay for certain applications. The problem begins when device manufacturers sacrifice performance requirements for cost reduction.

Maybe to get 15 years of service life, you can use those Taicon or Teapo caps. Reputable manufacturers do it all the time. You can cost down your capacitor buy and ship a similar product with a reduced service life which is essentially what happened with Antec's OEM for the Truepower line (not TP New). This is in some ways an exception, however.

Usually the manufacturer doesn't stop at capacitor selection when slashing costs which is why (in the case of PSUs) I feel things like missing filters, anemic heat management, diodes instead of a module for the FWR, fake parts, etc. are often more indicative of a shitty product than whether or not it has Jap caps on board. Besides, we're all working with vintage hardware, so sooner or later those caps will probably have to be replaced anyway. If that's the main weak point, it's something we are likely more prepared to address.

Taicon are okay generally (just Nichicon's Taiwanese subsidiary), they don't seem to be terribly different to their Nichicon-branded counterparts, though their HD series caps tend to be pretty bad on cap-plague era equipment. HM and HN caps are almost always terrible, even Nichicon-branded ones, and they often fail 'silently' without any outward visible symptoms. I've replaced enough of 'em in old Dells and HPs to know. If you spot any HM or HN caps on a motherboard, consider replacing them with polymers.

I use Illinois, Kemet and Cornell Dubilier on occasion, they don't seem to be bad at all, and are reasonably priced most of the time. (Kemet have me a little worried though, their series names and cap/vent construction seem suspiciously similar to Teapo.) I also occasionally delve into Wurth Elektronik for very small orders of odd-bod values. Rubycon, Nichicon and Chemi-con are obviously the top-tiers, and for good reason.

Eep386 wrote:

HM and HN caps are almost always terrible, even Nichicon-branded ones, and they often fail 'silently' without any outward visible symptoms.

Just like NCC KZG series, these are a known defective run. Any date coded 2006 or newer should be fine.