Motherboard Quality

Started by PabloMack, November 17, 2018, 12:01:33 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

PabloMack

I think the quality they put into motherboards has improved in the past several years; and in particular the capacitors. My previous system used a single-threaded Penium 4. Remember those? The motherboard on that system died one day when an electrolytic capacitor went BANG! That system lasted me only six years.

My current system is merely a quad-core AMD Phenom II based on pile-driver. But it runs circles around the Pentium 4 and will be 9 years old in January. It has been so reliable and that's why I've continued to use if for so many years. It has gotten to be too slow for Terragen renders and that's why I have decided to get a Threadripper next year. I'll probably continue to use my old system for quite a while. The new one will basically be the one I outlined in WAS's thread about Threadripper. I am hoping that the teeth-cutting problems will all be solved by the time I shell out the money. The 2950X should at least double my current system's single-threaded performance but multi-threaded rendering should improve at least ten-fold if I am to believe the reviews that I've been reading. It will also be my first system running Windows 10. My capital expenses over the passed three years have gone for robotic machines. But I'm finally making the move to high performance. Really looking forward to Santa this year.

WAS

#1
Quote from: PabloMack on November 17, 2018, 12:01:33 PM
I think the quality they put into motherboards has improved in the past several years; and in particular the capacitors. My previous system used a single-threaded Penium 4. Remember those? The motherboard on that system died one day when an electrolytic capacitor went BANG! That system lasted me only six years.

My current system is merely a quad-core AMD Phenom II based on pile-driver. But it runs circles around the Pentium 4 and will be 9 years old in January. It has been so reliable and that's why I've continued to use if for so many years. It has gotten to be too slow for Terragen renders and that's why I have decided to get a Threadripper next year. I'll probably continue to use my old system for quite a while. The new one will basically be the one I outlined in WAS's thread about Threadripper. I am hoping that the teeth-cutting problems will all be solved by the time I shell out the money. The 2950X should at least double my current system's single-threaded performance but multi-threaded rendering should improve at least ten-fold if I am to believe the reviews that I've been reading. It will also be my first system running Windows 10. My capital expenses over the passed three years have gone for robotic machines. But I'm finally making the move to high performance. Really looking forward to Santa this year.

I think it entirely aligns with frabrication, and use. I still have a Mac II that works, a NEC from 1996, and  Toshiba from 1997. We went through 3 NEC's, Mobo's kept frying except the last one which actually just lost a solid connection to the mobo via it's ribbon, and they left it with us anyway instead of recycling it cause the PC repairman thought it was so dead it wasn't worth taking. Turns out it was fine. The Toshiba, however, was a beast. It's seen thousands and thousands of hours of use in 21 years. I was using it for Diablo 2 and old Windows 95 games just a couple years ago for fun.

Heck it's CMOS battery on the Toshiba is still pushing full volts.

My Xeon x5450 rack has literally had soda dumped in it, and our RV roof leak into it popping a PSU, but Mobo was fine after being soaked while running. Only the PSU died.

Oshyan

There was actually a several year period where capacitors (I think that's what it was) were being manufactured poorly and were semi-routinely swelling and failing on a wide variety of motherboards. There is a whole generation of boards that happened with if I recall correctly. It's been a long time since I've heard of such problems, and I do think we're getting better at manufacturing such components in general, especially as higher power levels combine with increased desire for energy efficiency, partly driven by evolutionary changes in modern computing.

- Oshyan

PabloMack

#3
I've done some design with electrolytic capacitors and their manufacturers specify a lifetime in hours & charge cycles @ so many volts. They are made using thin strips of aluminum coils separated by a gel. The electrolysis involved in storing a charge chemically degrades them as happens in lead-acid batteries. Atoms go into solution and are redeposited in slightly different places on each cycle. Microscopic metallic tendrils grow and eventually short out the coils. Runaway heat production brings about an explosion. I think a lot of new high-quality capacitors don't use electrolysis to store charge. The goal is to store more charge in a smaller space and electrolytic capacitors do that well at the expense of life-time.