Ok, a VP6 with bad caps is definitely no surprise to anyone... However, this one was a really strange one... I purchased it for almost nothing, the owner not knowing what was wrong with it (although, I had a good idea)... She told me it just froze one day, and that was it... It never POST'ed or worked again after.
This board would not POST upon arrival. Infact it did some goofy things I've NEVER seen any motherboard ever do! Upon power-up, I could hear a faint high-pitched 'whistling' coming from the board... I thought it might be one of the bad capacitors venting, although, it didn't resemble this... If I removed power, the whistling immediately stopped. Typically a venting cap will gradually silence over a few seconds when power is removed... When I reapplied power, it immediately started again... HEH, the board was singing tunes to me... I didn't have a PC speaker connected, and there were no fans attached to the board. I only had a heatsink on the CPU just for a quick test. This VP6 is definitely one of the worst VP6's I've seen with bad caps. Every single 1000uF had vented, and every 1500uF except one had vented. The one that didn't vent real 96pF on my Sencore LC102, so it was definitely toast, despite the fact it didn't pop like the rest.
While I was never able to isolate or actually identify the whistling I heard, I did recap the board, and it was 100% successful, replacing 23 caps. The whistling sound was cured also. I did some modding with the new capacitors, testing different values... This yielded some interesting results that even surprised me! The results are coming soon! These results will be posted in the Custom Mods and Tweaks category in the forum.
This board would not POST upon arrival. Infact it did some goofy things I've NEVER seen any motherboard ever do! Upon power-up, I could hear a faint high-pitched 'whistling' coming from the board... I thought it might be one of the bad capacitors venting, although, it didn't resemble this... If I removed power, the whistling immediately stopped. Typically a venting cap will gradually silence over a few seconds when power is removed... When I reapplied power, it immediately started again... HEH, the board was singing tunes to me... I didn't have a PC speaker connected, and there were no fans attached to the board. I only had a heatsink on the CPU just for a quick test. This VP6 is definitely one of the worst VP6's I've seen with bad caps. Every single 1000uF had vented, and every 1500uF except one had vented. The one that didn't vent real 96pF on my Sencore LC102, so it was definitely toast, despite the fact it didn't pop like the rest.
While I was never able to isolate or actually identify the whistling I heard, I did recap the board, and it was 100% successful, replacing 23 caps. The whistling sound was cured also. I did some modding with the new capacitors, testing different values... This yielded some interesting results that even surprised me! The results are coming soon! These results will be posted in the Custom Mods and Tweaks category in the forum.
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