Reply 20 of 27, by Falco
gdjacobs wrote on 2020-08-28, 00:03:No matter what, I probably wouldn't use them in anything critical, anything which undergoes any kind of stress, or anything which is difficult to service. They definitely do fail (although not so often as the ChongX fake/clone caps). They're like the low end of the cut rate, although definitely better than absolute garbage caps.
In the 5 or so years I've used them, I've put them on motherboards, power supplies, LCD monitors, video cards and some consumer electronics. Not had a single instance of failure so far. If they were going to start dying, they would have started letting go years ago, especially in hot box power supplies. It's pretty fair to say they're middle of the road caps that do their job fine in most general purpose applications. Of course there are some applications you definitely wouldn't want to use them in, like RF gear or CRTs.
gdjacobs wrote on 2020-08-28, 00:03:I think your time is usually more valuable than the few cents you'll save, but even if you want a more economical option there are much better choices available.
The price difference is actually pretty substantial, it's not just a few cents, or I'd not bother buying them. As an example, I can get 100 ChengX 47uF 16V caps for .019 cents a piece, or $1.91 shipped to my door. The cheapest I can find from Mouser for 100 of the same rated (but not same brand) is $19.47. Digikey is actually a bit more at $20.21. So that's about 10.5x the cost to use bargain basement name brand capacitors. It's well worth the cost for me because if I were to have to stock dozens of different cap values for "emergency can't wait" repairs, it'd easily be hundreds of dollars.
"Bad cap" websites inflate the cost further, since they're incorporating their time and overhead of buying and sorting capacitors for you and their website costs, etc. They have their place making cap kits for the random guy trying to fix some old machine with minimal experience, but aren't a source for people that know what they need.