Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

[topgun]

I have a Biostar mother board that had a few blown caps near the cpu. I saw
6 that appeared the same and removed them for replacement. However after removing them I found they were not all the same. There were 3 - 3300uf 6.3v and 3 - 1800uf 16v. The tops were different also. The 3300 have a Y on top and the 1800 have an X on top. Tpictures I see on the web all of these 6 match on the top. I do not know which one came out of which holes since I assumed they were all the same. I need help determining which cap belongs where.

Thanks in advance

[severach]

Re: Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

Comparing vent style will not work. Manufacturers change cap brands constantly.

Typically the 16v caps running 12v are farther away from the CPU than the 6.3v caps running around 1.0v. Put all 16v caps in then measure voltages.

[c_hegge]

Re: Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

Power the board on without the caps in (although it obviously won't start) and measure the voltage in the cap spaces. It they are 12v, then a 16v cap goes there. If around 1 volt, then a 6.3v cap goes there.

[momaka]

Re: Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

Power the board on without the caps in

NO, NEVER do this!
You can easily damage a MOSFET.

Post your motherboard's make and model instead, and perhaps some pictures of it as well (if you have a camera). That way we may be able to help you determine which caps came from where.
Alternatively, if you have a multimeter, set it on resistance or continuity check, and see which caps are in parallel. Basically what you want to find is which cap spots on the motherboard have their positive leads connected to each other. Most likely the 6.3v caps will be in parallel near the CPU (will have their + leads connected together and you will get 0 to 1 Ohms on the multimeter), and the 16v caps will be in parallel a little further from the CPU.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

One solder pad for the +16v caps should be connected to a +12v power pin in at least one of the PSU connectors.

[momaka]

Re: Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

One solder pad for the +16v caps should be connected to a +12v power pin in at least one of the PSU connectors.

Unless the CPU is powered by the 5v rail. In which case, the 16v caps could have been used just for their lower ESR value.
Back in the days, Jetway among others, was known to use 16v caps on VRM high on their socket 462 motherboards, even though the CPU was powered by the 5v rail and those caps only had 5v across them.

[370forlife]

Re: Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

Except it's a socket 775 board so it's powered off the 12v.

[momaka]

Re: Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

Except it's a socket 775 board so it's powered off the 12v.

...
Well I finally noticed the title in the thread.
- I sure feel stupid right now .

So yeah... uhm, you can ignore what I said in the above post . Sorry about that.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

...
Well I finally noticed the title in the thread.
- I sure feel stupid right now .

So yeah... uhm, you can ignore what I said in the above post . Sorry about that.

What you said is right, just not on THIS board. . LOL

[linuxguru]

Re: Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

Old thread, long bump up. I recently recapped one of these - Biostar 945GZ Micro775 SE, with 5 visibly bulged caps.

These were:

PCT11: 3300/6.3 KZG. Replaced by 1500/6.3 Rubycon ZL (not critical)
PCT12, PCT13: 3300/6.3 KZG on Vcore. Replaced by 3300/6.3 Nichicon HM(M), >2005 date code
PCT1 and one other: 2x 680/4V NCC TMV on Vcore. Replaced by 2x Sanyo SEPC 560/6V polymers.

There were a huge number of OST RLP and small RLG all over the board, which I left alone - not worth my time to replace those. Also 3x 1500/16V KZG on the VRM +12V rail - if they didn't fail in ~12+ years, they're not going to fail now.

Why bother recapping this board at all? Just for fun - it supports the 65nm Cedar Mill Netburst P4s, as well as early Conroes, all Prescott, Smithfield, Presler and some Allendale. RAM support includes DDR2-400 and 533 (very rarely seen these days).

The Cedar Mill P4 631 is POSTing fine and running reliably with CPU temp at ~42c idle. It was a short-lived 64-bit (EM64T) P4 with HT that was upstaged by the Conroes within a few months of their introduction. They're a bit under-appreciated - with Enhanced Speedstep from the Centrino era, these idle with frugal TDP and are usable even today for office tasks and browsing. XP support for 945 is better than for some later chipsets.

[linuxguru]

Re: Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

FWIW, I had an Allendale Core 2 Duo E4400 2GHz/800 FSB/2M lying around in my spare parts bin, which works fine on this board and overclocks comfortably to 2.66 Ghz/1066 FSB with stock DDR2-667 RAM, stock HSF and stock voltages

(I'm not a HardOCP type - I prefer underclocking and undervolting most of the time for reliability and lower wall-plug power consumption. I just tried this OC to see what kind of timing margin is possible on this 12+ year old board + proccy. Apparently, lots of margin - 3.0 GHz/1200 FSB also works, but the proccy warms up a bit. I haven't tried 3.33G/1333 FSB - I don't think the board supports it. This board + proccy brings back memories of the Tualeron era, fully 18+ years ago.)

[momaka]

Re: Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

Old thread, long bump up. I recently recapped one of these - Biostar 945GZ Micro775 SE, with 5 visibly bulged caps.
...
Why bother recapping this board at all? Just for fun - it supports the 65nm Cedar Mill Netburst P4s, as well as early Conroes, all Prescott, Smithfield, Presler and some Allendale. RAM support includes DDR2-400 and 533 (very rarely seen these days).

Nice!
In all honesty, I really do like to recap older boards like these as well. Aside from cap problems, they rarely have anything else go bad on them (save for chipsets, if it's an nVidia.)

Good save!

I myself saved a Zotac N73V-AC7V motherboard about a year ago. It supports Pentium 4, Pentium 4 Extreme Ed., Pentium D, all Core 2 Duo chips, and even all Core 2 Quads. Box says 1066 MHz FSB is the max, the board will recognize and run 1333 MHz FSB CPUs fine all day. Only thing I don't like about that mobo, besides the nVidia chipset, is that it has only two DDR2 memory slots.

PCT11: 3300/6.3 KZG. Replaced by 1500/6.3 Rubycon ZL (not critical)
PCT12, PCT13: 3300/6.3 KZG on Vcore. Replaced by 3300/6.3 Nichicon HM(M), >2005 date code

Yup, the 3300 uF 6.3V KZG are notorious for going bad. Even if they look OK, they are bad by now. They are replace on sight for me.

There were a huge number of OST RLP and small RLG all over the board, which I left alone - not worth my time to replace those.

The ones around the expansion slots can often be ignored. But if there are any around the RAM, chipset, or CPU, you should replace them. OST RLP in particular likes to go bad quite often. RLG is just general purpose, and if not heat-stressed, they'll be OK.

Would be cool to see some pictures of the board, if you have any. At least I am curious where these OST caps are located... and I also like to see old boards recapped and running again.

Also 3x 1500/16V KZG on the VRM +12V rail - if they didn't fail in ~12+ years, they're not going to fail now.

Yes, I find that the 1500 uF 16V KZG don't fail very often either. Usually, they have to have been abused by heat or ripple current quite a bit to fail. I used to replace them (and still do if I have better caps on hand, taking these as "spares" to use for testing PC hardware), but not so much anymore.

XP support for 945 is better than for some later chipsets.

Agreed.
If it has i915 or i945 chipset or older, I prefer to stick with XP on that. i965, on the other hand, can go either way just fine (that is XP or Vista/7.) And for anything newer, its Win7 for me.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

The Cedar Mill P4 631 is POSTing fine and running reliably with CPU temp at ~42c idle.

Idle temp is on the high side, reminds me of my Northy on my MSI 845E Max, which idled at 45C. Those parts are long gone now. They were abandoned by the mid-2010s. Gives me the impression that Northwoods are hot chips.
Hot for the watts they give!

[linuxguru]

Re: Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

Idle temp is on the high side, reminds me of my Northy on my MSI 845E Max, which idled at 45C. Those parts are long gone now. They were abandoned by the mid-2010s. Gives me the impression that Northwoods are hot chips.
Hot for the watts they give!

Northwoods idled warm, but didn't spike too much under load - the 65W S478 Northwood 2.66/533FSB/512k that I still have as a spare, also idles at ~41c. The HT-enabled 89W Northwoods with 800FSB idled a bit higher. In comparison, 65nm Cedar Mills with 800FSB and 2M cache idle fairly cool, and Prescott-2M with Enhanced-Speedstep are just a bit higher. All of these run cooler than Prescott, Gallatin, Presler and Smithfield P4s.

Sure, Core 2 gives better delivered Performance per Watt, but the last generation single-core (with HT) Netburst P4s weren't too bad on heat dissipation. I have an IBM ThinkCentre A51 with i915 Barbados BTX mobo with ~2004 date code that's running a legacy Fedora Core 3 installation on a 90nm Prescott 3GHz/800/2M just fine after ~15 years - it helps that the caps are mostly Rubycons, Panasonic, Sanyo and a few polymers in the VRM. AFAIK, that i915 mobo doesn't support a 65nm Cedar Mill, but the performance difference between the Prescott-2M and Cedar Mill were negligible, clock-for-clock - it was just a die-shrink from 90nm to 65nm. I could try to migrate that FC3 installation to a Core 2, but it will likely come a cropper on lots of device-drivers including arcane stuff like PATA IDE and on on - so I left it running on the i915, where everything just works, including the Northbridge graphics with 2D accelerated X - it's even snappier than the quad-core S771 Xeon X5460 with sticker mods in a G31 with PCIe Quadro FX 580 graphics, that I'm typing this on (that's another odd thing about graphics - 2D accelerated BitBlt performance today on a cutting-edge PCIe adapter is not much better, if at all, compared to single-chip AGP GPUs with embedded-DRAM on-chip frame-buffers from c.1995, almost 25 years ago. 3D rendering has hugely improved of course, but not basic 2D stuff required to run Window Managers, 2D CAD/CAM, Browsers and so on. Why has 2D performance not improved? Because today's frame-buffers are on external DRAM, which are constrained by the width of the data path from the GPU. By contrast, the c.1990s Embedded-DRAM GPUs had very wide on-chip data paths to the eDRAM, often 256 bits or wider - and could do BitBlts in a snap, even at modest clocks of ~100 MHz.).

[linuxguru]

Re: Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

Only thing I don't like about that mobo, besides the nVidia chipset, is that it has only two DDR2 memory slots.

I'm OK with 2 slots for DDR2 mobos, because 2 GB DDR2 DIMMs are readily available. It's a bigger problem in the DDR1 era, where a minimum of 4 slots would be required today to reach 3 or 4 GB - there are several such mobos, but mainly full-sized server or gaming mobos like the DFI LanParty NF4-SLI that I recapped recently - and it's still finicky about mismatched DIMMs. It works, but requires a +0.1 or +0.2V bump to the 2.5V Vdimm setting in the BIOS for reliable operation (probably a DIMM issue, not a mobo issue, though I noted 2x 1000uF/16V KZGs near the DIMM slots).

The ones around the expansion slots can often be ignored. But if there are any around the RAM, chipset, or CPU, you should replace them. OST RLP in particular likes to go bad quite often. RLG is just general purpose, and if not heat-stressed, they'll be OK.

Would be cool to see some pictures of the board, if you have any. At least I am curious where these OST caps are located...

The 820 or 1000uF RLPs are all over the place except the VRM - DIMM slots, Northbridge, Southbridge, PCI slots. None is visibly bulged, but they probably fail silently like other OSTs, Teapos, G-Luxons and so on. I'll try to post a pic in due course.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Indentifying caps on Biostar 945gz Micro775 se

Northwoods idled warm, but didn't spike too much under load

Unrelated, but reminds me of my early-batch Wolfdale E8400, with the C0 revision, IIRC. That one rarely reports less than 45C or similar! But the temp doesn't go up much.

I don't recall my late-batch Wolfdale E8600, with the E0 revision doing that!