Saving a Abit AN7 for the sake of it.

[Bungz]

I already have a growing collection of enthusiast boards from my youth and indeed already have a nice working example of a AN7 but hey ho for £5 on ebay I got one with obviously blown VRM caps and a nice 2800+ in it.

Abit boards are funny because you never quite know what you are going to get capacitor brand wise, they seem to chop and change. My original AN7 has Rubycon caps for the VRM stuff with Nichicon HM around the board (not that big a fan of HM tbh but better than KZG).

This dead board has Rubycons and KZG on the VRM

I think it is a earlier board so maybe they wised up and went full Rubycon later, or maybe its just luck.

Anyway the £5 ebay AN7 wouldn't post and its CPU read out was doing odd things, cycling through some codes really slowly then powering off with the correct code for power off. I took this as it still being salvageable as it was semi behaving.

Recapped it then tried again. 3300uf 6.3v Panny FR all near VRM with a blown KZG of the same value near the chipset replaced with a known good salvage nichicon HM as I ran out of stock of the FR.

Same but went through codes quicker but still got stuck then powered off

Tried another CPU, some ram and even another Bios chip all the same. Was falling over before it got to the Bios sequence.

Thought it might be bin time, I have the worst luck recapping nforce2 boards!

Then I changed the PSU for a older one and tried it with no CPU.

Different code, correct for no CPU.

Stuck a Sempron in it and it whizzed through the codes as I would expect and it booted

Bit of a silly story but these late run NF2 boards are fantastic for the Athlon XP's and worth saving if I get a chance, someone has to

Anyone else save bits of tat just for the thrill?

[Wester547]

Re: Saving a Abit AN7 for the sake of it.

Well, the Nichicon HM is either worse or better than the KZG it replaced depending on the datecode (2001 - 2004 are the worst of them, 2005 are hit or miss, and 2006+ are fine).

[Bungz]

Re: Saving a Abit AN7 for the sake of it.

It's a temp fix, was better than what was there originally with it's guts hanging out

Will replace with another FR, there is also a 2200uf KZG thats healthy to be swapped out.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Saving a Abit AN7 for the sake of it.

so it was a bad psu? cuz the board struggling to get through the post checkpoints and doing it slowly certainly sounds like it.

[Bungz]

Re: Saving a Abit AN7 for the sake of it.

I am not sure, my other AN7 works fine with it but maybe it helped.

Think it was just finding a way of getting it out the loop it was in, booted fine after I got the no CPU code.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Saving a Abit AN7 for the sake of it.

There are some errors that seem to "stick" in the CMOS and a hardware change is needed to reset them. Seen this plenty of times.