Bad Cap Manufacturers

[ampdoctor]

I've pretty much always used CDE, mallory, Vishay/Sprague, United Chemicon, Panasonic, and Nichicon for as long as I can remember and have never had an issue with those brands.  However I'm not trying to squeeze every penny of margin out of the BOM and I know they're quality parts.  What I find interesting on that list is how many of the shady cap mfg's have names that are dangerously similar to top tier mfg's, probably hoping for confusion in the market by the purchasing agent. 

Also, for the life of me I don't understand why somebody would buy caps on Fleabay from oddball asian sellers. You're barely saving anything compared to the major vendors like Digikey, Mouser, etc, who have prices pretty much cut to the bone anyway, and you've got no clue who the seller is, whether or not they're old stock, or worse if you're buying counterfeit parts. If it costs me 10c more per component it doesn't matter to me as a service tech or if I'm building a one off, and I know exactly what I'm getting and who I'm dealing with.

[retiredcaps]

Also, for the life of me I don't understand why somebody would buy caps on Fleabay from oddball asian sellers.

Since you live in the USA, you may not understand some minimum orders, custom/duties, high shipping costs and other factors that most International customers, including Canada, face when dealing with a distributor.

In addition, most people who buy capacitors have no clue as to what is required or what are good brand names.  So getting them on ebay for cheap, because someone on youtube recommended it, is easy.

[GreyWoolfe]

Dell Optiplex GX270 computers had motherboards that had them and it was a major pain in the ass for them.  My company had a couple of thousand of them deployed in the field.  Dell ended up extending the warranty for a year, sent up a couple of thousand replacement boards and paid us to replace them.  Then, we were having Dell 15" LCD monitors failing.  Come to find out that the same caps were on the power/inverter board.  I can't count how many of those monitors I replaced bad caps on, but my boss allowed me to buy the parts and expense them so I went for Panasonic caps.  No more failures.

260's, 270's, 280's were also the bane of my existence.  If it wasn't the motherboards, it was the power supplies, or the hard drives.  Now it's the 760's and 780's.  I would never recommend Dell to someone for desktops.  I've had decent luck with their laptops though.

We are no longer deploying Dell in the field here in Florida, we are using HP Z series.  The company, however, supplies us field techs with Dell Inspiron laptops.  These work just fine.