The story:
So one of the labs at my university was throwing out discontinued equipment, and amongst the stuff were a few computers. One of them was this MSI 915PL Neo motherboard. For me, this motherboard has two firsts: PCIe and Intel 64 on a desktop board. Free from the dumpster! Anyway, I powered it up and it worked! Great! But I realised that just because it POSTed doesn't mean it's stable, so I slapped in a hard drive and installed Windows XP. It randomly restarted during the install and that was my first sign of issues, but I couldnt see any obviously visual capacitor problems. So I got Windows installed, but it would seldom be able to fully boot up. It would get to the loading screen and then just restart every time. When I finally managed to get it into Windows, I ran Prime95 to really give it a test, but after a few hours it was still happily chugging along without any errors! So I had a closer look inside with a flashlight and there it was... In all it's bulging glory!
The problem:
Just about all the capacitors on this board are Chemi-Con (KZE, KZG, and KZJ). So how many should I replace? I'm tempted to replace them all. Only that one capacitor was bulging, not that a capacitor has to be bulging to be faulty. Also, there are four polymer capacitors around the CPU, they should be fine, right?
What would be your recommendations for a replacement brand? I've seen the good caps thread and I'm leaning towards Rubycon.
The plan:
-Research the specs of the original caps.
-Source suitable replacements locally, if possible.
-Give the board a good wash.
-Add to my cluster project.
I'm not one to brag, but I've impressed myself with the desoldering skills that I've developed given this is my first recapping expedition
. What do you think?
I apologise for the lengthy post, but it's how I do things
.
Regards,
TheSolarShed
So one of the labs at my university was throwing out discontinued equipment, and amongst the stuff were a few computers. One of them was this MSI 915PL Neo motherboard. For me, this motherboard has two firsts: PCIe and Intel 64 on a desktop board. Free from the dumpster! Anyway, I powered it up and it worked! Great! But I realised that just because it POSTed doesn't mean it's stable, so I slapped in a hard drive and installed Windows XP. It randomly restarted during the install and that was my first sign of issues, but I couldnt see any obviously visual capacitor problems. So I got Windows installed, but it would seldom be able to fully boot up. It would get to the loading screen and then just restart every time. When I finally managed to get it into Windows, I ran Prime95 to really give it a test, but after a few hours it was still happily chugging along without any errors! So I had a closer look inside with a flashlight and there it was... In all it's bulging glory!
The problem:
Just about all the capacitors on this board are Chemi-Con (KZE, KZG, and KZJ). So how many should I replace? I'm tempted to replace them all. Only that one capacitor was bulging, not that a capacitor has to be bulging to be faulty. Also, there are four polymer capacitors around the CPU, they should be fine, right?
What would be your recommendations for a replacement brand? I've seen the good caps thread and I'm leaning towards Rubycon.
The plan:
-Research the specs of the original caps.
-Source suitable replacements locally, if possible.
-Give the board a good wash.
-Add to my cluster project.
I'm not one to brag, but I've impressed myself with the desoldering skills that I've developed given this is my first recapping expedition
. What do you think?I apologise for the lengthy post, but it's how I do things
.Regards,
TheSolarShed
Comment