Odd Marker Marks on Capacitors - Dell Dimension 4600

[DaveLembke]

Discovered marker marks on the capacitor tops for all capacitors on this Dell ( Intel E210882 ) Motherboard of the Dell Dimension 4600 that my daughter finally parted with for a better computer.

My thoughts on this was that this board was inspected possibly by Dell for capacitor issues during the capacitor plague. However the Build date stamped on the inside of the case is May 11, 2003 and I thought the capacitor plague was a problem that happened around 2 years later in around 2005.

Anyone else see capacitors marked in this way as if the main board was quality / capacitor health inspected?

Funny thing is that like 5 years ago when upgrading her from a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz to a Celeron D 2.8Ghz I must not have been paying attention when swapping CPUs to not take notice of the marker marks. I asked my daughter if she opened her computer and did that and she said no and then questioned why I felt she would do that since she is 14 years old haha. 

Surprisingly the Celeron D performed better than the Pentium 4 2.4Ghz with half the L2 cache at just 256k, however the 400Mhz faster clock and SSE3 instruction support helped.  She played hours and hours of Spore on it which ran just fine on the Celeron D but the Pentium 4 lagged. This Celeron D 335J is like the only Celeron D made for socket 478, all others are socket 775. Surprisingly they never made a Pentium D in socket 478, they only come in socket 775. Obviously the socket 478 Celeron D 335J was made for low cost systems to slap the newer "D" processor tag on when Pentium D and Celeron D systems were coming out and socket 478 boards were cheaper to place into lower cost systems. It came out of an e-Machine that I expected to have a socket 775 board but to my surprise was a socket 478. If I had a Pentium 4 2.8Ghz of faster (HT) CPU to stuff in this board though it would have out performed the Celeron D because of the extra thread, cache, and FSB. Saving this motherboard in case I find an old school system use for it. 

The history of this computer is that it was a decommissioned office computer that I picked up 5 years ago and the business was the original owner of it since the Fall of 2003. So this tosses out the possibility that it was reconditioned and capacitors checked in the refurb process. They pretty much ran it for 10 years and never sent it out for service as well. It was a very reliable computer for them. However after 15 years of use its lost the battle with being a realistic computer for internet use and gaming of new games. So I had a spare motherboard that I purchased for $55 which just needed a newer 24 pin power supply, SATA drives, and DDR3 1333Mhz RAM. So I upgraded one of my computers to 16GB DDR3 1600Mhz on a Black Friday RAM purchase for G.Skill RipjawsX and gave her the 8GB of DDR3 1600Mhz which will down clock to 1333 and loaded it up with Windows 10 Home 64-bit and the Black Friday deal for Intel 545S Series 256GB SSD installed with a 750GB hard drive using a ICY DOCK Express Cage MB322PS-B which allows 3 drives to fit into a single 5.25" bay for 1 x 3.5" drive and 2 x 2.5" drives. https://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=197

I think I am going to pick up another one of these ICY DOCK Express Cage's for my computer to add more SSD's and remove my dual-DVD drives and go with a singe DVD RW drive.

She was upgraded from:

Celeron D 335 2.8Ghz Single-Core with GeForce 6200 256MB Video Card and 1GB DDR 400Mhz RAM 80GB IDE HDD with Windows XP Home SP3

To:

AMD A8-5545m Quadcore APU 1.7Ghz with 2.7Ghz Turbo with AMD HD 8510G GPU, 8GB DDR3 1600 ( Running at 1333mhz), and 256GB Intel 545S SSD with Windows 10 Home 64-bit

*She stated that she wished she upgraded sooner because its so fast now. Gave her the Dell Dimension 4600 back with only thing original now being the case.  (Note: I had to chop the Dell Front panel connector and wire it up with universal front panel connections and shrink tube insulated connections. Dell had a proprietary connector for front panel as this case was never designed to take an upgrade path like this.

[patio]

Likely marked by the texh that replaced them...for whatever reasons

[DaveLembke]

Well the funny thing is all capacitors are marked as if they checked all of them. Board doesnt show any signs of reworked solder connections.     

Maybe this was a QC sample board such as 1 board checked out of every 100 or something to know that a batch should be good.

I did QC for electronics like 20 years ago and we had these stick on arrows to stick onto backwards or wrong parts to point out problem areas for rework-ers to fix problems and we initialed the white area of silk screen on the good ones which later became a ink stamp with QC inspector number because some of us had sloppy handwriting for fine tip sharpie marker.  Yup I was one of the sloppy hand writings. 

[BC_Programmer]

Bad capacitor production was centered from 1999 through 2003. 2005 is when it started to get publicity because they were failing.

My Dimension 4400 motherboard failed because of bad capacitors. At least that is my assumption, since they were starting to vent and the system was hanging after some time being powered up, even in the BIOS screens.

[DaveLembke]

COOL ... Thanks BC

So Dell likely was checking them for this then and marked them on my board.

Didnt know it started sooner than 2005. Thanks for that date correction for the capacitor plague.

I didnt see the problem myself until around 2006 on a Dell Optiplex that died like 4 months after in operation with both capacitors venting around the CPU as well as what really pointed it out was the power supply making a loud pop and the system no longer functioning after letting out the fishy smell white cloud that made the office smell like rotten fish for a week, but remembered in the news around 2005 just about all big name computer manufacturing companies getting hit with this problem. I was thinking that it wasnt found as a problem until 2005 when it made its way into the news. So the problem was more of a behind the scenes issue I guess in 2003 when they inspected this board.

Company i worked for also had greater than 50% failure rate on HP Small Form Factor Business Class Pentium 4 systems around 2006 also due to the swollen venting capacitors leaking out yellowish brown electrolyte crud from their tops and sometimes bottoms.