dddane
join:2002-01-10
Chicago, IL
| Dell Optiplex GX270 motherboard recall?
There is a known problem with capacitors on the GX270 motherboard bulging and corroding... (Actually, this is a problem on a lot of systems... the GX270 and a few others have a more specific problem where the capacitors were overfilled).
This has affected a significant number of PC's at my site... A unisys tech told me yesterday that there are companies in Chicago that have had hundreds and thousands of these motherboards pro-actively replaced, all free of charge upon request... He told me he has heard there will be a full scale recall to these boards in the next month or two. a few other people on the net say they have already received stuff from Dell regarding this.
Can anyone confirm if this is the case? Can you forward me a copy of a letter/e-mail Dell wrote saying what they are going to do? I'm having a hard time finding anything "official" from Dell where they are admitting an issue with the boards..
Also, how do I go about determining exactly which boards are effected? Some have said it was their "earlier" GX270's.. I haven't really tracked which have gone bad enough to know if it was my early order of them or a later order... But also I wonder if its a life span issue, where just the early ones are coming up bad now...
Thanks...Dane |
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willawake
Premium
join:2004-05-01
greece
edit:
June 21st, @01:48PM
| the only thing official which i found was a notice on Iowa State university academic information technologies site advising their users. but that page was later deleted (perhaps on request of Dell) I saved a copy of the text :
Recently Dell recently discovered potential problems with a capacitor on the system board of GX270 systems with medium and small form factor motherboards. The problem is isolated to a specific capacitor supplier which was used in system boards manufactured from April 2003 to March 2004. The defective Nichon capacitors were placed on two manufacturers' GX270 motherboards between 04/01/2003 to 03/20/2004.
However we have discovered that the Nichon capacitors were not all produced outside control specifications. Rather the affected capacitors were limited to certain batches made during specific shifts during the manufacturing process. This means that not all GX270 motherboards are affected. Unfortunately, there is not specific way to determine which motherboards are affected and which are not.
Specifically the capacitors were filled with more liquid than required. After an approximate service life of 300 days and when the CPU reaches a core temperature of 64 degrees C they will begin to bulge and eventually overflow onto the motherboard causing a system crash and a "No Post" failure on boot. There is usually no data loss associated with this issue.
Dell became aware of the problem in the last several weeks based on high numbers of customer tech support calls related to the GX270 motherboard failures. Because of the extremely long time lag between system install and the beginning of the failure rate spike it was impossible to anticipate the problem we now face. In response to our engineering research regarding the suspect capacitors and motherboards, we have decided to proactively replace GX-270 motherboards at specific customer locations.
The GX270 motherboards have not been made in the past year and our on hand reserves required for normal fix on fail warranty repairs have been strained. We have arranged for these motherboards to be remanufactured however that process takes time to ramp up. Delivery of sufficient numbers of boards to move forward with proactive field replacement is not anticipated for some weeks. The Nichicon capacitor manufacturing glitch affected a batch of Nichicon HN(M) and HM(M) series capacitors. Reports of fails of these series of capacitors were noted on Dell GX270, Dell 400SC serverboards, Intel Brand motherboards 845/865/875 series (various models but not all) and Apple iMac G5. (only limited to motherboards manufactured between certain dates which had capacitors from this batch installed on them)
It is a pity because Dell/Intel/Apple would have chosen Nichicon as one of their suppliers because of previous good track record. This is unlike some other motherboard manufacturers which choose capacitor brands with previous bad track records, presumably cos of cheaper prices.
here's intel's advisory
»www.intel.com/cd/channel/reselle···3414.htm
There are many reports of Dell/Intel/Apple replacing affected boards but no sign of any recall notice apart from the above info.
Dell use Rubycon capacitors in place of the Nichicon on the replacement boards.
here is links to relevant threads on our badcaps forum in case you have not seen
Dell GX270
»www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=450
Dell 400SC
»www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=660
Another forum with more info on 400SC
»www.aaltonen.us/forums/viewtopic···&start=0
Intel D865GBF
»www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=430 |
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catseyenu
Ack Pfft
Premium
join:2001-11-17
Fix East
clubs:
edit:
June 21st, @08:23PM
| reply to dddane
Appreciate your keeping/posting a copy of the Iowa State university advisory!
SC400's dying at 1 year mark:
»forums.us.dell.com/supportforums···2#M13069 |
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dddane
join:2002-01-10
Chicago, IL
edit:
June 22nd, @11:29AM
| reply to dddane
hmm... dell class action suit anyone? 
btw, thanks for posting that iowa state thing... its interesting that they say the approximate life span is 300 days. for a lot of these systems, that's right about now.
so I inquired with other offices in our company... Some others were aware of issues as well... some people were looking into this issue, and determined that it had only affected 3% of our systems (at the time, this was a year ago)... But the numbers they used to come up with this 3% number didn't include everyone, since not everyone in our company uses the Premier Access (or whatever its now called) web site... We're recalculating our numbers...
Apparently, Dell only issues Proactive Field Replacement (their word for recalls) if the number of affected systems is at 10% or higher.
What I'm still unclear about is this... does the 10% number come from overall GX270 systems, 10% of the systems manufactured in that specified date period (4/03-3/04), 10% of systems on a particular order, 10% of systems at a particular location... etc etc. 10% of what. Does anyone know the answer to this? ;O)
In a way, it couild make a huge difference... if we have 5000 GX270 systems, but 1000 of them were ordered between 4/03-3/04, and the other 4000 ordered after the affected time period, using the overall number of gx270 systems would greatly lower the probability of us hitting the 10% mark... even though the real number might be that 49% of those first 1000 systems is affected.. |
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