Panasonic Industry has issued a statement that polymer capacitors are not the cause of frozen GPUs, CPUs and superheated boards in some applications.

The manufacturer of a wide range of capacitors, stated that “this assumption is entirely incorrect” and advises designers of taking the behaviour of polymer capacitors into consideration during circuit development.

Two different types of capacitors – respectively a mix of both – can be used to design a GPU or a CPU board: Polymer technology functions significantly better at higher temperatures and has a high reliability. MLCCs (Multilayer Ceramic Capacitors), on the other hand, tend to function better at high frequencies, but are prone to cracking.

Hence, combining both technologies would be the option of choice – the appropriate number of Polymers and MLCCs, however, varies according to the specific design.

“Speaking about the presumed hardware damages, a comprehensive evaluation of the overall circuit is essential to state whether a graphics card is stable or not. There are different factors that might cause a GPU to freeze, such as hard drive, overheating GPU, bad memory or failing power supply due to many reasons. As a consequence, the assumption of only Polymer capacitors causing the failure of graphics cards is unrestrained – and wrong,” Panasonic Industry wrote in its statement.