My 450G died on me this weekend. I’ve had it running for some two years or so with no problems whatsoever. I had the feeling it was a serious hardware problem as it wouldn’t beep when I applied the power. Also a reset (holding reset and plugin in power) didn’t made any difference. Serial cable didn’t report any chars when booting and the link leds on the interfaces stayed off. Could be a was the proud owner of an overpriced brick.

I posted the issue on the MikroTik RouterOS forum and apparently a lot of boards are plagued with faulty capacitors. The electrolytic capacitors on the PCB seemed a little bulged and indeed that was the problem.

So I paid a visit to the local radio shack and he was positive those electrolytics where bulging. Spent €1.20 for two new ones. Cannot get 560uF but the consensus is that 470uF will suffice just as well. On another note, I have an 25W or so soldering iron but the guy at the counter was positive I could replace them as there is enough empty space around the mount so heat won’t have much influence on the other components.

So I dove in. I replaced the old capacitors with new 470uFs and it spun back into life. Sweet! I repaired the RouterBOARD for less than a beer.

The Routerboards are an amazing piece of hardware and I would buy one again in a heartbeat if this one fails beyond repair in a near future. Too bad there are series out there that are plagued with the faulty capacitors, but that’s some upstream component problem a lot of hardware builders are troubled with.

At work we have some RB 450Gs in service. We have some spares on the shelve, but I think we have to spend some 10 mins for each board to replace the capacitors on forehand. The one at home was the first to fail, but as people on the forum state that they are replacing caps for years, failure must be imminent.

There are a lot of pointers on the MikroTik forum about these capacitor problems and ways to replace them. Even came across a rule of thump to get an uF replacement value.