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Old 05 February 2020, 14:40   #3
ajk
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Join Date: May 2010
Location: Helsinki, Finland
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The capacitors on the A600 and A1200 are fairly early surface mounted electrolytic caps. The seals on them are not that great, and over time caustic electrolyte will leak out causing damage to the PCB.

The A500 uses through-hole capacitors, a very mature technology even at the time, and they very rarely leak.

Additionally, almost all the electrolytic capacitors on Amiga motherboards are only there to provide voltage stability and are not that critical to operation as long as the power supply is good. In fact, you could run the systems with all caps removed* and they would work more or less normally.

Therefore, even if the capacitors on an A500 have aged, it doesn't usually cause issues. However leaking capacitors (on the A600 and A1200) are a problem because that will ruin the board.

Aging capacitors in power supplies are an entirely different matter and those should definitely be serviced, but on the Amiga all power generation is external.

Personally, I have recapped one of my A500 boards because I was working on it anyway. But there was no particular reason that demanded it.


* There may be some exceptions; I think the A600 has one electrolytic capacitor involved in the reset circuitry and that probably can't be left out
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