Your comment regarding "Turquoise and silver sleeved" caps prompted me
to look at my MB. I have a few of those type caps, but they are not in
the regulator circuit. On the MB you are citing, are they everywhere or
in some area other than the regulator??? I was just wondering if I have
a MB I must watch. Thanks.
There are other makes that have also been turquoise and
silver, like Sanyos. Well they might've actually been a
little closer to hunter green, but anyway...
Among the caps I've seen failed, G-Luxons, particularly the
turquoise w/silver, do so quite often. I can't very well
claim they're ALL defective, could just be unsuitable for
their applied use in some circuits, on some boards.
K7S5A has had them all over the boards, of larger (>= 1000
mfd) caps there are roughly 16 or more of those G-Luxons...
though at some point ECS replaced 3 of them with Purple &
Gold striped Ost caps. Anywhere there was high ripple
they'd be subject to failure, and heat shouldn't help either
since they're electrolytics. There were several most-likely
to fail about the CPU socket, at the top and bottom of the
memory slots, nearer the northbridge and AGP slot.
Others not (as) likely to fail (or at least not rupturing by
the time the board had failed from the OTHER ones failing
sooner) might be around the USB pin headers, between PCI
slots.
I would be weary of relying on any board that uses
significant numbers of those caps. I believe G-Luxon also
has other cap models with higher impedance and that
sometimes a board manufacturer will use the turquoise simply
because they bought in high enough volume to use them.
Otherwise I've seen boards using better Rubycon, Nichicon,
United Chemcon caps in the subcircuits with highe ripple but
the Black and Gold (those I presume to be their higher
impedance model caps) G-Luxons seem to have fared well
elsewhere on the board.
I suspect what it boils down to is that the G-Luxon
Turquoise and Silver either have ESR that is too high for
per applications they're used in, misspec/cost-cutting by
the board manufacturers, OR G-luxon themselves has
mis-spec'd them... or maybe QC is just so bad that a high
percentage of the product is substandard- I dont' know and
prefer to just avoid them.
I believe G-luxon has also switched to using Pinkish-purple
sleeves too, perhaps to mimic Sanyo Oscons, I would guess.
Sleeve colors are only a first step in identifying problem
areas, but overall it can tend to come back to which
manufacturer one chooses, as ECS/PCChips seems to be one of
the worst when it comes to barely engineering their boards
to work, such that a board may work fine initially but too
little margin means the caps wearing out will reduce
stability incrementally, and randomly, the worst kind of
problem for someone to troubleshoot if the caps haven't
visably vented.
Back to your original question, you're probably ok if the
Turquoise G-Luxons aren't in the regulation subcircuits but
their presence could be a sign of other cost-cutting
measures that could effect the regulation subcircuit cap
spec'd, too... or if it ain't broke don't fix it? No easy
answer there until a problem appears and can be traced back
to the caps.
