Capacitor values.

[BOCTOK]

For all you high-speed, low-drag individuals, a couple of questions.

When replacing capacitors, should the exact voltage be used, or can it be slightly different?

Also, if anyone knows the values of the ceramic chip capacitors just above the socket on a 7VRXP rev. 1.1, could you let me know? I have one that looks a little flaky. I'll try to post a pic later, so you can see the one I'm talking about.

[Topcat]

With electrolytics, you can safely increase the voltage, but NEVER EVER decrease it unless you know the design specs of the actual circuit and know that the voltage of the circuit will not exceed the voltage rating of the cap. I commonly use 10v caps in place of 6.3v caps. A good example of a board where the rated voltage can be decreased is on a Gigabyte GA-5SMM, where they use Choyo 330uF 25v caps that tend to go bad. Why they chose to use 25v caps is beyond me, I've probed all the circuits and found the voltage never exceeded 7 volts, so I replaced them with 330uF 10v caps and never had an issue. The board has been running over a year like that.

As a rule of thumb though, NEVER decrease the voltgae of the caps, mild increases are OK.

As far as your Ceramic/Tantalum caps, if they're not marked, there's no way of getting the values from the actual caps. You will need to obtain the white papers for the board, and there's slim to no chance of that... The manufacturers' ususally keep that info pretty close to their chests.