The other day at work my monitors suddenly shut off.  The computer was still running, which is a good sign, and connecting one of the monitors to the motherboard’s video card (and seeing an image!) quickly showed this to be a failure of my primary video card.

So I harvested a video card from another computer and when I took the video card out of my computer I saw, to my surprise, this:

april09-0211

Four of the 1500uF caps have popped!

A web search showed that this was not an isolated failure – many of these cards have had caps exploding on them.