I have a dead PSU. I opened it up, and I found three bulging 1000 µF general purpose-type crappy electrolytic capacitors. I've replaced capacitors like this on several motherboards in the past, so this will be fairly trivial to do, but the only capacitors I have handy are low-ESR types. Could a swap like this work out, or should I grab a few general-purpose capacitors from a supplier?
Electronic – replace a general-purpose electrolytic capacitor with a low-ESR capacitor
capacitoresrpower supply
Best Answer
Generally, low ESR can be used to replace general purpose capacitors, but there are situations where the low ESR capacitor could cause oscillation due to the use of a finicky regulator.
For example, the LM1117 is a very common semi-LDO regulator (mostly because it's cheap and you can get them very easily).
It has requirements as follows (from the datasheet):
A lot of low-ESR 1000uF parts are better than that (by more than 10:1 in some cases).
You could always add a series resistor to degrade the low ESR parts.