My JBL MPX1200 is now a smoke Machine

There's a story behind the bulging motherboard caps... There was a massive batch of them around a few years ago, which were manufactuered using an electrolyte formula which was stolen from another company. The formula was wrong, however, and all these caps fail prematurely. Many went into motherboards, lots went into Sky Digiboxes (made by certain manufacturers) and others went into general PSU applications. I used to know the manufacturer's name but I can't remember it at the moment.

Hi, thanks for your reply's everyone, not got the photo yet unfortunately, will try and get it this week.

Wrighty,it was Dell...i know of companies that had to change the motherboards on 200 of their Optiplex Dell machines...it got so bad,Dell woud still change them under warranty even after 4 or 5 years...the capacitors would bulge at the top,and the machines would reboot continuosly.

Omicon was the capacitor maker who supplied Dell.

I think Gigabyte and Asus were affected as well, as far as I am aware Foxcon make the majority of the boards for the brand names and they were supplied with the defective caps.

Most of the mobos I've come across with faulty caps have been MSI (MicroStar) and Abit, but I doubt it's limited to them. As I say, these caps made their way into all sorts of things, with the same results.

Yes we had 10 Dell Optiplex GX270 changed last year because of that.

First generation iMac G5s were affected by it too, had it happen to two of mine.

Hi there, it's finally been repaired, thought i'd just send it to some people who know about these things! Turns out a couple of output transisters had blown. It's fine now though.

Really? It was still working, smoke coming out, yet it was output transistors.