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Comment by ReC757 | Hacker News Reader

I remember many years ago a bad batch of dell small form factor machines that constantly failed to popped capacitors. It would always be near the power supply where the heat was greatest. I guess in that certain area the capacitors were outside of their operating range...

Nevertheless, as a bored 16 year old, I enjoyed ripping apart all the machines and calling the higher level support lines to order replacement motherboards.

As time went on, they took my word on if a machine had failed due to this specific issue. I really enjoyed the responsibility and trust. Since I could fix the machines faster than Dells support turnaround, I just asked them to send the parts.

After about the hundredth machine, I never wanted to seat a processor again. This was back when processors had hundreds of fragile pins too!

It’s likely that those experiences really pushed me towards software development instead of IT. Good times...

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> After about the hundredth machine, I never wanted to seat a processor again. This was back when processors had hundreds of fragile pins too!

They still have hundreds of fragile pins. I just bent a few on an AMD Ryzen 7 that got popped out of its socket due to too weak a socket clamp while removing the fan.

You know the saying - ‘The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.’ Turns out, it applies to the past, too.

Intel went to LGA where we the pins are on the motherboard. In my experience they are much less likely to be damaged there as they get protection from the socket.

I’m not sure why AMD stuck with PGA.

LGA designs place the quality control onus on the motherboard manufacturer and their supply base. When your marketshare has relegated you to being the "budget-conscious" choice like AMD found itself for over a decade, the last thing you want is the budget quality motherboards 3rd parties are supplying to cut corners and potentially tarnish an already shaky brand perception. I've always applauded AMD for bringing excellent low to low-midrange hardware to market even during the worst of times, but of the many Phenom II, Piledriver, and Kaveri builds I put together for people back in the day, only a handful included a midrange or high end motherboard. Most were built with overall price/performance on a strict budget as the #1 goal and the $55-80 motherboards that ruled that market weren't as lovingly designed and carefully packaged as the $90-130 motherboards that dominated the Intel market at the time. You can find plenty of forum posts complaining about budget Intel boards coming with bent pins out of the box and the usual advice was to just buy a nicer motherboard. Now consider that a "nicer motherboard" would blow the budget for many of these AMD systems and that they often used even lower end boards than the cheapest recommended Intel builds. Manufacturing and making sure a female PGA socket survives packaging and shipping is far more error tolerant than manufacturing an LGA, especially if that LGA would only be made in quantities 1/20th the number of Intel LGAs. In short, I believe AMD keeps using a PGA expressly to avoid these issues given their market position.

Lower cost, and some people are really attached to it because it's easier to repair pins if they get bent. You can straighten out PGA pins with a razor blade or a mechanical pencil pretty easily, LGA pins are... "challenging". It can be done but it's not easy.

(also, to be blunt, AMD processors undergo such extreme depreciation that they're practically disposable. After two years, AMD's flagship 1800X processor has lost 2/3 of its value, a nice high-end mobo like a C6H is literally more valuable than the flagship processor you had put on it. So it makes sense to have the processor be the one with the easy-to-damage sacrificial part on it. Intel it's the other way around, the processors are expensive and your mobo is probably the cheaper part to replace if needed.)

WOW you aren't kidding. First gen Threadrippers are cheap now.

I've seen the 1950X as low as $450 at Microcenter. TR4 motherboards are quite expensive, but right now the Taichi is around $260 after rebate at Newegg. Note that not all of the motherboards are designed to handle the higher-TDP 2970WX/2990WX, if you think that's an upgrade you'd make then look for one with a beefier VRM. Also, the cheaper ones lack 10 GbE or some other higher-end features.

You can also find the 1700 as low as $130 if you watch around. Needless to say, if you have any batch-processing type tasks that don't need AVX2, that's a hell of a deal too.

Threadripper and Epyc are LGA though. They probably stick with PGA for Ryzen because of cost.

> I just bent a few on an AMD Ryzen 7 that got popped out of its socket due to too weak a socket clamp while removing the fan.

Twist/shear the fan off instead off pulling straight.

Totally agree! When Samsung first released their flat screen LCD TVs, ours kept failing after two years of usage and was out of warranty. Apparently a bunch of Korean TVs (including LG) had a bad batch of caps from their vendors. Getting it fixed would of cost $300. Buying my own cap and fixing with my dad cost $1. It was a fun bonding experience too.

I got a few of those Dells for free and re-capped the motherboards with a soldering iron and some desoldering wick. If I recall correctly, the replacement mobos had a chance of having bad caps, too, so re-capping one yourself was the only way to be sure.

Bonus: I never had to re-seat any processors or swap out memory.

Those were probably the Dell Optiplex GX280's.

Horrible design, internally anyway. Caps near the power supply or CPU heatsink were prone to failure. At the beginning of my IT career I swapped many of these motherboards. Fortunately the power supply and motherboard were easy to remove and replace.

I think this was a Pentium 4 machine which also was notorious for running hot.

Saw it with Dell Optiplex GX 270 as well. I supported between 50 and 100 of those at some time and we had to swap 30 motherboards in 6 months.

More info used to be available here: https://www.badcaps.net/, haven't verified recently.

One thing I've heard recently though is that Dell still makes batches of bad hardware and their service is stil (or again) bad. In particular a recent xps batch has had a 50% failure rate while Dell support keep blaming the users IIRC. Source: sysadmin friend of mine.

PS: once you get through, their technicians used to be great.

Yep! System board part number 38HRF and equivalents -- if I never see another one of those doggone things, it'll be too soon!

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