I have an ancient AMD 770 motherboard, a BIOSTAR TForce TA770A2. Worked fine enough
I had 8gb of RAM, and wanted to upgrade to 16gb. I bought some RAM off ebay, I will spare you the gory details, but long and short of it, no configuration of RAM would actually boot into Windows. Sometimes I would get a BIOS post, and Windows would crash, sometimes I would just get a black screen. So I gave up and stuck my 8gb back.
A couple days later, I am using the PC, and it just shuts off in the middle of being used. Like it lost power. I reboot, use the PC for a minute, happens again. Reboot again, 30 seconds in the PC freezes. Reboot again, as long as I do nothing the PC runs, but I start using it, and in a minute or so, bloop, power off. I swapped HDD's, same thing, so I know it's not an HDD issue
So I strip the whole thing down,. and want do I see on the motherboard? A bulging capacitor next to my RAM slots. It's the only thing that looks out of the ordinary, so I fire up the soldering iron, fight with the thing for damn near an hour getting it out, replace it (it was a 10v 1000mF capacitor, I only have a 16v 1000mF capacitor on hand, but the internet tells me it should work)
Solder the new cap in, reassemble the PC, and it powered up. I ran the Windows memory test and it completes and no errors. I'm typing from it now and it's already tun longer and one more than what would have caused a shutdown earlier.....
Did I actually just fix it?
I had 8gb of RAM, and wanted to upgrade to 16gb. I bought some RAM off ebay, I will spare you the gory details, but long and short of it, no configuration of RAM would actually boot into Windows. Sometimes I would get a BIOS post, and Windows would crash, sometimes I would just get a black screen. So I gave up and stuck my 8gb back.
A couple days later, I am using the PC, and it just shuts off in the middle of being used. Like it lost power. I reboot, use the PC for a minute, happens again. Reboot again, 30 seconds in the PC freezes. Reboot again, as long as I do nothing the PC runs, but I start using it, and in a minute or so, bloop, power off. I swapped HDD's, same thing, so I know it's not an HDD issue
So I strip the whole thing down,. and want do I see on the motherboard? A bulging capacitor next to my RAM slots. It's the only thing that looks out of the ordinary, so I fire up the soldering iron, fight with the thing for damn near an hour getting it out, replace it (it was a 10v 1000mF capacitor, I only have a 16v 1000mF capacitor on hand, but the internet tells me it should work)
Solder the new cap in, reassemble the PC, and it powered up. I ran the Windows memory test and it completes and no errors. I'm typing from it now and it's already tun longer and one more than what would have caused a shutdown earlier.....
Did I actually just fix it?
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