Gigabyte recently shifted many of its mainstream and
enthusiast grade motherboards to all solid state capacitors construction. It
paired these electrical components with improved ferrite core choke coils, Low
RDS MOSFET's and comprehensive passive cooling thermal solutions. The
combination of all these parts, according to
Gigabyte, helps reduce temperatures, improve power efficiency to the CPU
and improve PC stability under load. The collection of features has been
suitably marketed as "Gigabyte Ultra Durable 2" on the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4
motherboard.
You may or may not recall the problem of burst capacitors that turned into an
industry wide epidemic a few years ago. What caused poor quality electrolytic
capacitors to burst after ~3 years is a story of industrial espionage, stolen
chemical recipe's, and cut rate electronic components. Consequently, the
benefits of higher quality Japanese-made electrolytic capacitors, and conductive
polymer solid-state aluminum capacitors has been stressed on virtually every
motherboard to have them since.
Solid state capacitors improve overall stability, and
last significantly longer than the electrolytic variety. When the burst
capacitor problem really hit, many computers suffered intermittent errors and
crashes. Only opening up the PC case to inspect the motherboard revealed that
the little aluminum capacitor cans had split, popped, and leaked gooey brown
electrolyte all over the place. Motherboards from almost every vendor suffered
to one degree or another, leaving users like you and me stuck with out of
warranty boards that no one wanted back, that no longer worked.
Given that the average desktop motherboard lifecycle is
anywhere from 6 months to 3 years, we think it should operate reliably for at
least that span of time.
If you've never looked twice at motherboard and know
nothing about what all the little black and grey spots actually are, let alone
do, you're in for a treat. In the above slide are the three components of
Gigabyte's Ultra Durable 2 approach. This is hardly a unique collection of
electrical components, so it's mainly significant because Gigabyte is making an
effort to stress its build quality over features. Shown here are the Ferrite
Core choke coil (this helps filter out EMI/RF interference), the LOW RDS(on)
MOSFET (power circuitry), and the 'All-Solid' aluminum Polymer
capacitors.
Gigabyte build the GA-P35-DS4
with high quality components which allegedly improve reliability and
longevity. Big claims, and difficult to prove, but PCSTATS is happy to see
more manufacturers moving away from the cheap electrolytic capacitors
available to the electrical industry. We've lost count of the number of
motherboards we've seen that have suffered from blown and leaking
capacitors just as they reach the 3 year
mark.
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