VOGONS


First post, by furyanwolf

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Hi all,

Gonna make this one super quick. This one cap on my newly acquired GeForce Ti 4200 is bulging ever so slightly. Is it worth replacing? Or am I best of just leaving it alone?

Images on Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/vgxvRrs (3rd picture of other caps for reference)

Reply 1 of 5, by Doornkaat

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A slightly bulging capacitor is not necessarily defective or out of spec. It only means that a bit of gas has developed on the inside, most often because it got a bit too warm.
On the other hand a visually fine capacitor can be completely dry inside.

In this case I would go ahead and replace all wet electrolytic capacitors without going through the trouble of verifying wether they're still ok. The card is old and sooner or later you'll have to replace all wet capacitors anyway. There's a total of nine on this card and since it's a nice purple 4200 with extra RAM heatsinks I'd say it's worth the couple of bucks new caps are going to cost you. 😀👍

Reply 2 of 5, by auron

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well, what does "too warm" mean? those caps are specified to work correctly a couple thousand hours at 85°C or 105°C, neither of which they should ever reach on a card like ti 4200. and given that they aren't from well-regarded brands i would rather assume a problem with their chemistry rather than everything being fine. and then there's the other sole cap looking like a chemicon KZG doing it's usual bulging at the bottom, eventually leaking electrolyte from the bottom bung...

that's definitely one case where i would just replace everything with panasonic FR or an equivalent cap, geforce4 ti is starting to get up in price anyway.

Reply 3 of 5, by Doornkaat

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I'm not trying to argue wether this capacitor is good or not. I'm saying you can never know from looking at an (almost) intact capacitor wether it's still fine or not.
Overvoltage and switched polarity will heat the electrolyte very quickly. While the outer windings may still be at acceptable temps the inner windings can already be boiling. A small voltage spike may leave a capacitor looking like that but functional nonetheless.
Again, I'm voting not to take a chance but instead to just go and replace all larger capacitors on this card.

Reply 4 of 5, by furyanwolf

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Thanks guys, I thought that might be the case, I would feel a lot better replacing all the caps anyways, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't wasting my time and money. Gone ahead and ordered replacement Panasonic caps (FR series) and FS series for the larger cap and will be replacing all of them hopefully this weekend. Thanks for the input 😀

Reply 5 of 5, by RandomStranger

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With caps looking like that I would take the leap of faith and chechk if it works and run some benchmarks. However replacing the caps is not a waste of money even if they work. As it was mentioned earlier, it's a nearly 20 years old graphics card. It's only a matter of time when those will fail.

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