Hit 500 motherboard repairs last month. Not bragging.

Everyone talks about just swapping boards. But I tracked every fix for 4 years. Number one failure? Bad caps on budget PSUs. Not the motherboard itself. Anyone else see this pattern in their shop?

2 comments

2 Comments

miles27717d ago

I've been keeping records too, and you're dead right. Out of 300 or so dead boards I've seen in the last couple years, maybe 30 were actually bad from the factory. The rest were killed by cheap power supplies taking out the VRM or blowing caps on the board itself.

blake_smith16d ago

Respectfully, I see it the other way - most of those dead boards probably had weak VRMs or bad caps from the start, and a decent PSU just took longer to kill them. A cheap PSU can finish it off faster, sure, but the board was already a ticking time bomb.