PNY Verto FX5700VE AGP Video Card

[ahahlberg]

My son's video card began failing intermittently. When I examined the card I found that 5 of 6 larger electrolytic capacitors had failed (swollen and showing evidence of expressed electrolyte). The only discernible markings are "1000 6.3V R1" on the top and no apparent date code or other marking on the bodies. I take this to mean they are 1000uf 6.3Volt. The markings are all on the top of the cap with a green semi-ellipsoid solid mark to the left of the lettering. The board was manufactured in China. The caps and an inductor are the only discrete components on the board. We can't find the receipt for this card so I'm assuming it's out of warranty (barely!) It's been a long time since I did any electronics repairs (was a computer tech back in the discrete component days!) so I'm curious about how they indicate polarity on caps these days - both on the component and on it's solder holes. There appears to be a convention in use on this card where there are round pads for the negative and square pads for the positive. Is this typical? It looks like a pretty straightforward R&R otherwise with the usual multilayer board concerns. Anything special I should be aware of with Video cards? And is there a preferred replacement manufacturer for caps on video cards I should know about - or will any of the best manufacturers do?

[willawake]

Re: PNY Verto FX5700VE AGP Video Card

dont suppose you could post a pic?



do you mean the green ellipsoid is like the above black ones? it should indicate the negative (except on asus cards). if it looks like that then install the new caps with their negative stripe the same way.

for the caps the lower the esr the better.
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=2280

[kc8adu]

Re: PNY Verto FX5700VE AGP Video Card

sounds like it needs a recap.
pny is a real pain in the ass to deal with so recap it yourself or send it in.
iirc i recapped one last week.
used radials to replace the sm parts.
board was set up for either.

[ahahlberg]

Re: PNY Verto FX5700VE AGP Video Card

Not sure how to post the picture - here's a try via an attachment - but the caps look basically identical to the photo you gave except the ink is green and the values are different - so what I called a semi-ellipsoid is just like the markings you show. And that marking correlates with markings on the board - on the component side there's a '+' sign opposite the side with the ellipsoid mark - and the marked (semi-ellipsoid) side matches to the round pad on the back side of the board so the whole thing makes sense now. So I'll follow the link you gave to look at recommended parts to replace them - but I recall a thread somewhere here regarding going up on the voltage rating. Should I look at a higher voltage part, like a 10V as long as I'm swapping them out or is there any technical risk in doing that? Was wondering if that might extend their life given that the 6.3V parts went bad.

[ahahlberg]

Re: PNY Verto FX5700VE AGP Video Card

Thanks for the quick responses - and I agree with your remark about PNY - got this terse e-mail back to a request for what my options might be to get the board repaired/replaced - answer:

"PNY doesn't repair video cards, only replaces them under the warranty
policy.

Regards

Gregory

PNY TECHNICAL SUPPORT"

So it sounds like they don't even bother to repair boards under warranty - they just send a new one - otherwise they'd have an inventory of fixed boards to sell to people in my situation. I'll do as you suggest - recap it myself - they're radials so it ought to be easy - never liked working on sm stuff - particularly caps and ICs.

[willawake]

Re: PNY Verto FX5700VE AGP Video Card

just match up the replacement caps stripe with the green semi-ellipsoids.
you can go up in voltage not down
you can go up in capacitance not down
they probably failed because they were crap. a quality cap with the same rating will be fine. you could go up to 1200uf or 1500uf but i dont see a reason to use a higher voltage there unless you can only source 10v but it would be fine also.
For nice looks you would need 8mm diameter caps for those 2 which are close together.

[scout62]

Re: PNY Verto FX5700VE AGP Video Card

I have two of the exact same cards, both of them have leaking caps.

[999999999]

Re: PNY Verto FX5700VE AGP Video Card

You can usually go down in capacitance, in these uses they aren't the particular capacitance used because they need it, it's because the higher capacitance part is larger and thus lower ESR (into whatever budget they had alotted). For example, sometimes you can use a large marginally low ESR 'lytic, or if you wanted to spend more you could use something like an OS-Con (with lower capacitance), at least on the bucked voltage, the input might need more capacitance than an OS-Con in that voltge rating could provide, so they just used the same exact cap for every position for ease and cost, not optimizing the design as much as they could've by picking most appropriate part.

As for polarity, you can see on the PCB that the positive and negative are silkscreened on under the cap, you wouldn't have to remember how the current caps are oriented.

Going with a 10V part(s) would work fine, but what I would do is consider the physical size most of all, that you can fit an 8mm dia. part with about 13mm height or less (before you start blocking adjacent motherboard slots), so in your preferred brand of cap, get the 6.3 or 10V that is as large as (close to) this as possible.