Capacitor broken off motherboard - still working. Will it last?

[kwangle]

Hi All,

I've just had a nasty experience whilst trying to move one of those £$%^& rotating clips that hold the graphic card in the slot. This things are a pain, they are very stiff and usually break if you try to move them. This happened to me, so I got a pair of long nose pliers and applied a little 'persuasion' (stupid). No use, but the pliers slipped and hit a capacitor which neatly dropped off. Motherbard f*******d I though, but it still boots perfectly and is seemingly fine. I played withe the idea of just trying to push it back onto the prongs sticking out of the board but thought better of it.

I've run video on it too and all seems well. I'm obviously concerned about the damage whilst feeling extremely lucky my computer still works at all as I do not have the cash for a replacement board. I believe that the caps are used to smooth out current in the board, so is losing one of many fairly harmless or will by board be unstable, develop a fault later or even be unsafe?

The board is a Gigabyte GA P55 USB3 with an i5 750. The capacitor I knocked off is labelled E016 560 6.3v and is labelled on the board as EC18.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,
Kw

 

[bgunner]

you can solder a new cap in its place. run to you local electronics repair store and get a new one and replace it. Caps store electricity for use when a heavy load is applied so there is no drop in current delivery. I would not use the board till you replace the Cap.

 

[kwangle]

Update: I continued to use this computer with the missing capacitor without any issue intil 2020. I only stopped using the computer due to upgrading the entire system. Whatever the cap did didn't seem to matter very much for the system ans the computer was used constantly and heavily during all the subsequent six years.

FYI if this is helpful

 

[ea15]

Actually that was super helpful,

MOBOs, especially x570 itx boards are so hard to find right now, i was afraid i would have a not working computer for a long time. I had an electrolytic capacitor break off just to the left of my GPU PCIe 16 slot. Labeled 5k v16 or something of that nature. So far games and everything seem to be working fine. Had no BSODs or shutdowns or anything.

Thanks for the 6 year later update. haha really helped me out