There Is No Relation Between Panasonic Polymer Capacitors And Graphics Card Failures
Several tech blogs and social media outlets have reported over the past few weeks that the usage of Panasonic Polymer Capacitors (namely the POSCAPTM and SP-CAPTM series) has caused instability/crashing of certain graphics cards. Panasonic Industrial would like to denounce these false claims and present Panasonic's position on the matter.
Both Polymer Capacitors and MLCCs have been coupled together on modern graphics card designs, as each technology holds several key advantages. Polymer Aluminum and Polymer Tantalum technology operates much more efficiently at higher temperatures and achieves long life with ESR as low as 3 milli-ohm. MLCCs are better at handling high clock frequencies, have a superior volume-to-capacitance ratio, but are not as temperature resistant and are prone to cracking.
Investigation into all circuitry related to the GPU or graphics card must be taken into account before one can address the exact cause of instability or subsequent failure. Power supply issues, bad memory, and overheating of the GPU are a few things to keep in mind when attempting to diagnose a hardware crash. Users should also ensure that their GPU drivers are up-to-date as per manufacturer recommendation.
As a result, the conclusion that Polymer Capacitors alone are the main cause of failure is unfounded and incorrect.
Panasonic Industrial continues to offer a wide range of Capacitor solutions to be used with MLCC technology on many modern GPU and CPU designs.
For more information on our ultra-low ESR SP-CAPTM and high reliability POSCAPTM Capacitor solutions, please follow the links below.
