I bought a Soltek KT333 chipset motherboard off of ebay. When it arrived, I took it out of the box to find that it had four swollen, leaking caps on it. I contacted the person that I bought it from and told them about it. They told me that they hadn't even noticed them, so they gave me my money back and told me to do what I wanted with the board. Some time later, I was over at the VIA arena forums and they actually had a Soltek representative that posted in there. I told them about the board, so they took my name and address and about two weeks later I received an envelope from Taiwan. Inside was a bag full of brand new caps. I replaced the bad caps on the board, and it has been running my CS:Source LAN server ever since.
This one is even better. I bought another board from ebay, this time an MSI KT3 Ultra. It had twelve bad caps on it, all of them were the 1000 microFarad,6.3V ones. It was running in my daughters computers for a while, but was giving blue screens quite often and would sometimes not boot unless I unplugged the power supply for a few minutes. I took a dead Socket 370 board that had all good caps on it and pirated nine of the caps I needed from it. I then soldered them onto the MSI board, along with three brand new ones that I got from Soltek. No more blue screens, no boot problems, and all the voltages are right on in Everest.
Another little trick for replacing caps: When there is still some solder in the hole and you can't put the lead through for the new cap, just hold the new cap in position and press lightly on it while heating the solder from the back side with the soldering iron. The solder becomes soft enough that the lead pops right through. Just FYI.
This one is even better. I bought another board from ebay, this time an MSI KT3 Ultra. It had twelve bad caps on it, all of them were the 1000 microFarad,6.3V ones. It was running in my daughters computers for a while, but was giving blue screens quite often and would sometimes not boot unless I unplugged the power supply for a few minutes. I took a dead Socket 370 board that had all good caps on it and pirated nine of the caps I needed from it. I then soldered them onto the MSI board, along with three brand new ones that I got from Soltek. No more blue screens, no boot problems, and all the voltages are right on in Everest.
Another little trick for replacing caps: When there is still some solder in the hole and you can't put the lead through for the new cap, just hold the new cap in position and press lightly on it while heating the solder from the back side with the soldering iron. The solder becomes soft enough that the lead pops right through. Just FYI.
i bet that what soltek rep gave you were panasonic fj caps... (or not..)
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