My Netgear DG834G V4 appears to be one of the many to suffer over heating and instability issues. Trawling the web for info suggests standing the router up vertically using the supplied feet fixes the overheating issue, it has sorted out most of my problems but I still have the rare drop out. While propping the router up I noticed it lacked a warranty void sticker, you can guess what I did next.



The first thing I noticed was a bulging capacitor, further inspection reveals all five electrolytic capacitors on the board are manufactured by Teapo... dammit Netgear. Teapo caps are infamous for premature failure, more Intertube research shows Teapo caps are common in Netgear devices and users have been re-capping their faulty Netgears with positive results.

Fortunately I've got some experience re-capping electronics, the router is also one of the cheaper devices I've worked with and digging up the receipt shows it's out of the warranty period. There isn't much to lose.

Order list to replace all five electrolyic Teapo caps :
1x 3300uF 25V
1x 1000uF 25V
2x 1000uF 16V
1x 10uF 50V

Next week on OvCL, the fate of DDY's router is revealed.

Nice, hope it goes well. I've never had stable enough hands to be able to solder well.

The replacement low ESR Panasonic caps arrived this morning:



Later in the evening, out came the cheapo Teapos:



and in go the Panasonic caps! The Panasonic equivalents were slightly larger than the Teapos, the two previously standing 1000uF 16V caps had to be laid down. Solder and flux everywhere but hey, it works! Finally, a heat sink recycled from an ancient GPU cooler was installed on the large Broadcom chip.



Now only time can tell if this was a complete success. brb.

Looks a lot nicer than most of the soldering work that i've done over the years. What chip was the broadcom one is that the one producing most fo the heat? im guessing there is a chip for wifi, one to control the lan, one for bb connection and then do routers have a cpu or sorts?

It's the Broadcom BCM6348 CPU that's the hottest and burns to touch, the broadcom WiFi chip (smaller one the left) and the Broadcom LAN controller (middle top) are cooler and warm to touch.

Routers (at the least the ones to my knowledge) have CPUs, some of them capable of running embedded Linux OSes like the DG834G v4.

ah kk. Guess its that I have always associated broadcom with networking would have been looking for an ARM chip or something like that but didn't realise they made low power cpu's aswell.

I've got a DG834PN

I found a topic on someone installing a 40mm fan to cool that chip before but didn't realise the capacitors fail too

Don't suppose you know if this applies to the PN as well?

I get the occasional drop out and have to reset it by unplugging it for 10 seconds so might give this a go

It's worth opening the router up to see what's inside e.g. bad caps. I suggest you check for any anti-tamper devices first if there is warranty left.

I'm tempted to install a fan myself, wouldn't be my first attempt to pimp a router though

Blue LED fan, woo!

There is ARM 7, 9 and 11, they use them for different applications depending on requirements.
In the Bluetooth space I think they use ARM 7, but it's still not very good MIPS/watt.

Well balls to that...

got home after work today to find the DG834PN had died

turns on but only the LAN lights light up, (number 1 as only one device wired in), might open it up to have a look but not holding my breath, plus i need to find the special screwdriver set

Had a BT homehub in the loft so using that now, i hate to say it but the wifi reception is a lot better, just a shame the unit is the size of a small house

I've actually been very impressed with the bt home hub. The older voyager they gave us a while back was fairly useless but this one is actually a really nicely put together thing.

sorry for the old bump

i had the same problem , but it turns out that the chip is overheating , i dropped a drop of water on it and it boiled

so i decided to put a heatsink and some thermal paste on it and its been working perfectly up till now