MSI R4830 OC : The exploding capacitor issue still continuing?

Question

For reference, my system spec:
MSI 790FX-GD70 mainboard
AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE
4GB OCZ Platinum 1600MHz memory
MSI R4830 OC graphics
1TB WD & 500GB Seagate harddrives
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate
System isn't overclocked and has never been.
The story...
Today after doing a bit of gaming (WoW) all of a sudden my computer BSOD'ed and after the auto-reboot of W7, the bios gave me an error notification saying: "a hyper transport sync flood error occurred on last boot. Press F1 to continue". After just continuing Windows booted fine and I was able to run the regular programs without any issues. Wanting to continue gaming, I again started WoW, and even before I got into the login screen, windows BSOD'ed again, after which the bios again came back with the hyper transport sync error.
Doing some research on the error, I came to a conclusion, that there apperently are many reasons why it occurs, but no single sollution to solve it. So I just continued, let my computer be for a moment, and idle'ing it for a couple of hours. During that time no issues at all.
Until about an hour ago... I wanted to try to get WoW started again and amazingly it did, without crashing. Until I was in the game for about 5 minutes and then the computer did NOT BSOD this time, but immediately did a full powerdown. Trying to power it up again after that failed, after taking the PSU of the mains and plugging it in again, the system would "turn on" for less then a second and immediately powered down again.
Time for some hardware inspection then. Took of the harddrives & dvd (power & sata) to no avail. The system would still only "turn on" for less then a second. Next to be taken out was the graphics card (MSI R4830 OC), after removing it the system would turn on again and stay on this time. So there it was... some sort of failure in the graphics card. After powering down again and inserting the graphics card again and then again trying to turn on the system, back to the previous situation where it would only "turn on" for less then a second.
This made it obvious that there was only a single cause to the entire situation and that's the graphics card.
After inspecting the graphics card I noticed the following:
(Click to see a larger version of the photo)
Note the upper most capacitor, it was bloated and had been leaking. Off all the capacitors on the board (most of them are solid-state caps, only 5 classic caps) this the only one that burst.
Seeing this immediately makes me remember the situation we had about 8 years ago, with exploding capacitors all over the place (I have seen much of my hardware in those year fail due to exploding caps): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
Considering the location of the capacitor near the power connector of the board, I suspect the capacitor to be related to handling the power supply from that connector. If that is the case, most likely the board might not receive (enough) power from the PSU to power the board, causing the PCI-E power usage to run to high, in turn causing the mainboard to turn of for safety.
How long this capacitor has been blown I don't know, but I wished I would have noted earlier. Until today everything worked fine, but it could very well be this cap was already blown for months.
As a final question, has anyone else recently had any exploding capacitors on MSI products (and I'm not talking about hardware from the problem era, but rather the more recent hardware, in which the capacitor issue should have been solved long time ago)?

Answer 1

The card is produced early 2009, so technically from the period after the issues there were with the bad Taiwanese caps. Out of the 15 caps on the board in total, 10 are solid-states and only 5 are still the old electrolyte ones, of which one obviously blew.
And indeed I am aware of what they are used for and what issues they cause if they go bad. Have seen approx. 20-30 motherboards & another 10 graphics cards fail due to exploding caps during the time where the issue arose with the stolen electrolyte. (Luckily only a few mainboards were actually mine, but had many friends and family members with the issue).
This is the first time I've seen the issue come up since around 2008 when an old socket 7 board blew which was owned by a family member.
I do wonder though how the unstable graphics card is related to the "hyper transport sync flood error", if at least this blown cap is the one and only reason my system BSOD'ed.