GSRCRXsi

so im building a desktop for my gf. and my dad is a computer junkie so im scraping something together out of old parts. he had an old emachines case that he was gonna throw out so i took it. initial inspection showed all i needed was a power supply, HDD, and some ram, and monitor of course. everything else was there. she doesnt need anything elaborate, she just wants a nice desktop.

so i started taking it apart and i thought everything looked fine. then my dad told me to check out all the capacitors and make sure none of them are bulging at the top. so i took a second look and sure enough there were 6 caps bulging and oozing out the top.



so i proceeded to desolder them. either my soldering iron sucks or the solder has a higher melting point. they just wouldnt come off. so i ended up wiggling them back and forth til they snapped off so i could push the remaining pins through the board with the soldering iron. this still was a pain, but i eventually got them all out.



now when youre doing this make sure you get capacitors that have the exact same rating to be sure you dont mess anything up with how the MB functions. you probably can go with a higher voltage rating, but i stayed safe and got exact replacements. also make sure you dont mix up the polarity. the loger pin is usually the (+) pin. and the short pin side of the cap has a marking with a (-) symbol. if you look at the first and final pics you can see that they are oriented on the board in the same configuration. also the physical size difference shouldnt matter since they are the same rating.



so then i just popped in the new caps and soldered them in.




and i saved myself about 70-75 bucks. i bought the caps from ebay, 20 for 7 bucks. buying a new MB would have been easier but this was more fun

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pissedoffsol

:nerd:

good work

Slammed89Integra

Definite :nerd: But shit. That's pretty technical. Personally when I run into stuff like that I just say fuck it and chuck the board.

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Sabz5150

During a certain period of time, there were *LOTS* of bad caps on the market. Most notably on Abit boards. It had something to do with one company stealing the formula for the cap oil from another, and botching the process.

Bad caps are one of the main reasons for board instability these days.

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TurboMirage

excellent job!

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Calesta

Actually, mostly on OEM boards. This is what got Dell and a few other large OEMs bad names for a while in 2003-2005 production hardware. I've had to replace more than a few caps myself.

Abit just happened to be one of the aftermarket manufacturers affected. Asus and a few of the other "high end" board makers didn't use the brands of caps that were bad as much as Abit did.

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GSRCRXsi

yea this boad is an intel micro ATX board that came out of an old e-machines box.

thanks for the compliments ive gotten pretty good at working with electrical components. i think its fun fixing electrical stuff like this.

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endlesszeal

Good shit. I have two older AMD boards that have bad caps and wont boot. But its so cheap to get a new board and cpu combo that its not worth the hassle, plus the combos would lap my old athlon xps.

And about boards having bad caps, its more of the older ones like 1999-2003ish because of the mysterious "stolen formula" scandal. ABit did get sued and lost and is/was offering to replace the boards or payout. The brand new boards and some other components are futuring solid ones now.

GSRCRXsi

well it looks like this MB has more wrong with it than the bad caps. i hooked it all up, power comes on to everything, (lights and fans) but nothing happens, nothing shows on the screen, nada. seems something else may have been damaged, possibly when the caps went. but im going to replace the MB and see if thats it.

makes me sad, i wanted this to work. im sure its not because of my replaced caps though

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GSRCRXsi

well its confirmed the MB was toast. something else must have been damaged when the caps went out. i replaced the MB with one i got cheap on ebay. and everything works now. im happy with it

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Celerity

yeah, that kind of shit never works anymore.

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