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Caught a motherboard rotting from the inside out on a routine check
Had a customer bring in a 3 year old laptop that was acting flaky... decided to open it up even though they said nothing spilled on it. The copper traces near the USB port were literally turning green and flaking off, all because of some cheap flux residue the factory never cleaned. I've seen this get worse over just 6 months in humid basements, but this one was in a normal office. Anybody else noticing boards from certain years turning into corroded messes faster than they should?
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the_brian3d ago
yeah cheap boards from like 2019-2021 are notoriously bad for this, seems like a lot of manufacturers skimped on proper cleaning.
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emma_wells833d ago
Right, sorry @the_brian, but I gotta push back on that a bit. I actually think a lot of those cheap boards from that era were fine if you knew what you were buying. The real problem wasn't cleaning, it was that people were buying bottom-of-the-barrel components and expecting them to hold up like a premium board. I've still got a budget Gigabyte board from 2020 in a build for my cousin and it runs perfectly after a quick dusting. Seems like the issues come more from bad luck with a specific batch or just really rough handling during shipping. Blaming it on "skimping on cleaning" feels like giving those manufacturers a pass for corner cutting on things like capacitor quality instead.
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brooket432d ago
Huh, that's a good point about capacitor quality. But the flux thing is real too, I've pulled apart boards where the residue looked like it was actively eating the solder joints. Maybe it's a combo deal, bad caps make the board run hot and that just speeds up the corrosion from the leftover flux.
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