Bad Caps on Soltek 75FRN2-L

[sledbc]

Searched and cant find one mention of the soltek mobo's on these boards, but they are plagued with the bad GSC caps, and these are very common budget boards, probably the best bang for your buck socketa nforce2 o/c board.
Anyways I have the bad caps on mine, my board died the other day, so I went about looking for any info on it. Turns out there are a couple forums that are represented by soltek themselves and they've been sending out replacement sets of capacitors to those who have been requesting them free of charge. I requested one and plan on changing them out when i get them.

The bad caps on my board are 5 3300uf 6.3v caps, 7 1000uf 6.3v caps and 1 1000uf 10v cap. That would be all the GSC caps on my board, as the rest are sanyo and look just great.

Here are a couple links to the other forums discussing the problems with this particular board:
http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=47727
http://forums.pcper.com/forumdisplay.php?f=30

[willawake]

tell us what brand of caps they send out. If they are not premium caps ie rubycon, sanyo, nichicon, panasonic i would not bother recapping your board with them. i already know about soltek sending out cap kits but curious to know what they send out. hope you are lucky.

[sledbc]

sure, I'll post the brand when i get the replacements. I dont have a good local source for capacitors here so I'll probably just install the ones they send, and see if that fixes the board. I would like to assume that a company that is going to the lengths of replacing bad caps on out of warranty boards wouldn't be sending out crappy replacements, but i guess you never know.

BTW, wasnt i reading on other parts of this forums that there have been a lot of nichicon caps failing as well? I priced out buying new caps from this site, but i would end up paying half what the board is worth by the time they got shipped to me here in canada after the exchange in the dollar, then i would have to change them out, and i would still not be guaranteed 100% that my board will work correctly......Maybe if it was a $300 mobo, but its not, it was only $75 CDN

[willawake]

nichicon fails are from series HN(M) and HM(N) but early 2003 date codes. otherwise ok.

topcat from this site offers premium rubycon caps. they will last the useful life of the board, ie recap once. if you recap again with GSC they will last the same time and then you recap again. cant compare the original price of the board with a board recapped with rubycons, it is a far superior board to the original.

[sledbc]

I understand...my board was unstable for a few days while gaming, then just died suddenly the other day. Power on and it shuts off between 2 and 5 seconds later. What are the chances that this is completely a cap problem, and that simply replacing the caps will make this board as good as new?
I've already bought an Abit AN7 so that will be my main board and I'll probably use this FRN2-L in my son's machine with my xp1700 once I upgrade my HTPC and I can stick my 2100+ which has a better stepping code back in my main machine, the 2100 easily runs 2334mhz on air all day long....back when the FRN2-L was new, this 1700 doesnt like getting much over 2100, but maybe it was a cap problem that prevented me from getting a decent OC out of it. I will soon know.

[HyperYagami]

Power on and it shuts off between 2 and 5 seconds later.

That can be the power supply too, but since badcaps is a known problem with that board I'd troubleshoot from that angle first.

[sledbc]

yeah it could be the psu i guess, but its a nice enermax 435w dual fan, plus I have a dozen leaky caps on my board.
BTW I just got an email from soltek

That's great!! We will forward your request to our sales Dept. Then they will send the capacitors to you soon.
BTW, the new capacitors are a different brand than the originals.