Must caps be blown to for them to have failed?

[Pylon]

I have an Optiquest Q9 monitor, which is notorious for poor quality power supply capacitors that fail after continuous use. Sure enough, my monitor died this morning, so I opened her up. The caps look fine. Not a single one is blown or bulging. Is it likely that the capacitors have still failed (e.g. dried out), or is it another culprit?

Thanks.

 

[PedroDaGr8]

Nope, they USUALLY do, but it is not unheard of for a cap to look perfectly normal but fail when tested with a meter (out of circuit).

 

[Mohonri]

Correct. I've repaired a whole bunch of monitors, and no, caps don't need to be blown to be bad. There are few enough caps on that inverter (pics and such available in this thread over at badcaps) that it'd be peanuts to replace them all. Heck, while you're at it, you could put some extra caps in the unpopulated spots--it'll reduce the current ripple into each cap and reduce the output voltage ripple, which will make things nicer for all the other electronics in the monitor...