Depends on just what that capacitor was there for.

A few weeks ago, I discovered that at least half the capacitors in my other's Athlon XP computer are bulging or busted and yet, that system continues to run fine. I did, however, tell her to plan on replacing that thing soon because who knows for how much longer that computer will be reliable.

Earlier this year I brought home a Dell Precision Xeon system that had a few bad caps and there was just no hope of being able to use that computer.

If their legs go through the board, they can be replaced with good chances of success.

Y'know, I still need to decide what to do with this thing. It's been kicking around for months now, but it looks like a replacement DDR2 LGA 775 board will run me at least fifty bucks.

I wish I knew more about why this thing is able to apparently function perfectly with vital components randomly lopped off. How can this be?

I suppose that the missing capacitors belong to the CPU voltage regulator section, those tend to be in large parallel groups, so if a couple of them are bulged or missing the total capacitance is lowered and the voltage regulator still works but at reduced performance (higher ripple or noise on the output). If the installed CPU is not pushing the power envelope or if it's not getting deliberately stressed it might work absolutely fine due to its operating tolerances.

I've had P4 boards with bad caps that worked as long as you didn't load the CPU too much (higher CPU load -> higher power consumption).

If a device continues to function in lieu of any capacitors, chances are it will simply be more sensitive to fluctuating voltages. For example, if you're using a crappy power supply, and the GPU suddenly increases its current draw, the voltage might dip slightly across the rest of the system. The capacitor would smooth this out if it were present.

Keep the motherboard in general use for a while, if it's stable, there's probably no need to worry too much.

Edit: Yeah, what 133MHz said. 😁

I see. I suppose the more important question is, would there be some risk of irreparably frying the CPU if the capacitors are there to regulate voltage?

You could just grab a scrap board or two and salvage a few caps from them provided they are the same rating. The vrm circuit on most boards and cards these days can be pretty lax that you can play around without catastrophic failure of the board or card. Some of us who do overclocking related mods love using caps with very low esr and high UF ratings 😀

Jorpho wrote:

I see. I suppose the more important question is, would there be some risk of irreparably frying the CPU if the capacitors are there to regulate voltage?

Capacitors don't so much "regulate" the voltage, they smooth out the waveform, so the voltage level remains constant.

You can somewhat compensate for the loss of a filter cap by using a decent quality power supply.