Im kind of surprised they were still using them in nforce boards.
I remember reading about it ages ago.
They may not have been... it seems the "defective"
capacitors were just plain instable, simply hooking them up
to a steady voltage like a battery would make them pop.
Then there were likely others that were just so marginal
that they weren't really suited for the circuits, or the
overall board design was poor in conjunction with marginal
and/or too few caps, and/or overclocking, and/or high
ambient temps plus poor case ventilation. Simply
overclocking like there's no tomorrow can vent a
non-defective cap.
Generally MSI has used fairly good caps. IIRC, Rubycon,
Nichicon, Teapo. Possibly some Hermei (sp?) there were
questionable but I'm unsure now if I saw them on MSI or some
other board.
Kind of feel bad about ABIT getting socked since they did admit to it
which others didnt seem to want to do and were always one of the
easiest companies to deal with in regards to getting an RMA. I know
cause Ive done my board and a neigbors. Should have done my ancient
Intel board too which probably did have bad caps. That was the first
abit board I had that went flakey and caused me to switch to Asus
which went flakey and then I switched back to Abit which went flakey
and I went to ASUS again.
I can't recall all Intel boards but many of the more popular
had pretty good caps. I remember their LX & BX boards with
large 12.5 dia. Nichicon were overengineered more than
anyone else's designs at the time. I probably have an old
Intel 440LX board that'd work fine if i cared to use it, and
would probably keep working fine for the next decade. I'm
still of the opinion that boards sold in the past ~3 years
will not have near the lifespan of their predecessors. That
is, those that didn't have defective caps.
Now Im with Chaintech.
Ive read a thing at XBIT labs --- I was wondering why there were so
few nforce3 boards around when I was looking recently and Xbit labs
had an article claiming the nforce3 chipset was so flakey and not up
to the performance of VIA some makers decided to skip using it and
used the VIA chipsets instead which you see a lot more of.
Then of course I read ABIT or ASUS is going to skip VIA for now in
regards to the PCI express boards cause its not as "efficient"
whatever that means.
And yet Anandtech chose the nforce3 MSI as best board. Its all very
confusing.
I feel like PCI Express was a long time in coming. I don't
mind Via chipset boards but it seems like their 32bit /
33Mhz PCI bus performance is still a little weak compared to
the Intel, nForce1/2, and Sis alternatives. Although I
haven't had IDE corruption or anything like that, I still
find need to tinker with PCI latency more often on Via
boards. Ultimately I think it's just going to take more
time for (any) new platform's bios and drivers to be
tweaked. Via or nForce, havent' made up my mind about them.
I'd probably pick based on price, board design and features
before one chipset over the other. I never did care much
whether one platform has +- 5% performance difference
though, I figure 5% is pretty trivial in the grand scheme of
things, considering how much performance has increased in
the past half-dozen years.
