Identifying bad capacitors

[Topcat]

This section is here if your system has become unstable and crashprone, and you've tried everything else and can't seem to figure out what the problem is.

Bad capacitors are more common than one thinks, affecting MANY motherboards by many manufacturers. Abit by far has been hit the hardest by this, but I've seen plenty of other popular brand boards die from this.

If you question your caps, post here with your symptoms and we'll try to get it figured out for you!

[Hot Rod Lincoln]

I am standing with a VP6 waiting for it to go.

Greeting all;

I own the ABIT VP6 board. I personally think it is a wonderfully done board. I guess I am \"on borrowed time\" as I have heard about the infamous capacitor problem from www.vp6-board.com. Well this weekend I was playing Grand Theft Auto Vice City (and pulling a nice wheelie, I might add) and then BSOD. Now this BSOD specifically targeted the sound card. It said \"sbpci.sys\" or something like that. I restarted and just for the hell of it I updated drivers. Ran the game again, it did not crash, but then again I did not play it for a long time. When the crash occured I have been playing it for like 6 hours.

So what do you all think?

I really want to keep this board, I love the fact it does not have all that \"onboard\" crap such as LAN, Sound, Video, etc.

Here are some specs on it.

2 1000Ghz Chips
Maxed out memory
DVD Burner, DVD ROM, CD Burner
3 200GB Hard Drives
128 MB All In Wonder

Thanks

[dustoff]

Did you get the DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL bluescreen? That's probably a driver issue.

[Topcat]

How frequent are the crahses? Dustoff is right about it possibly being a driver issue. If you're using an SB Live, the VP6's chipset and the SB Live sound card were never known to be best friends...

Have you removed the side of your case and taken a look at the caps? Are they swollen up or bulging?? Thats the big tell tale sign. Don't worry too much if they are, the VP6 is a really EASY fix!

Here are a couple examples of what swollen caps look like:
http://www.kabalsrealm.com/systems/p...s/vp6/RAM3.png

Here's a diagram of which caps on your VP6 go bad:
http://www.kabalsrealm.com/systems/p...vp6/Layout.png

[stretch0069]

Had the same issues here. As per the crüe @ VP6-board, I replaced my PS and Caps.

The caps being (or going) bad tend to amplify PS issues. With all the drives you have, you can give a 300W PS a work out. Thats what I had originally. The Antec TruePower430 I'm running now works very well with the recap'ed board.

I really wish I could have taken a better approach to what the cause was. I would get the DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL screen. I also have a SB Live (have also ran Audigy and PCI128 with no problems). I don't remember changing anything on the SB, driver wise. It did make a difference in which slot I had it though.

[Hot Rod Lincoln]

Hey Guys

Well I had some time last night and I took off the cover. Now I did not see any bulging or anything that look out of ordinary around the capacitors. I did upgrade my power supply about 3 weeks ago from a 200W to a 530W. I was not able to push the burner unless I added more power. Now when I closed it up I started it I decided to try GTA Vice City again. I was scared and saved frequently in case it crashed again but it ran smoothly. In fact, I played it for quite a few hours without a hiccup. When it crashed (I am running Windows 2000 Advanced Server) it created a file that I later checked and I am now positive the crash was \"sbpci.sys\". There was no \"driver/irq\" error. Just another quick question, is there a time period when these boards breakdown? I mean will it happen after a year or use or 2 years. Or are the capacitors issue not time related.

Thanks once again

[Topcat]

The average lifespan of a VP6 with the cap problem is about 2 years. That seems to be the lucky number... Most of mine never made it that long, since they ran 24/7 as servers... Most average users' VP6's did live about 2 years before developing the problem.

[stretch0069]

That 200W PS is really low. I'm wondering (i try not to do that too much in case i get lost) if the 300W PS I had didn't cause, or at least help along, the failure of my caps. That 300 just didn't have enough juice to run both CPUs and their fans as well as having every slot filled with something, 4 sticks of 512M RAM, a DVD drive, a CD-ROM, a CD-ROM burner, and 5 hard drives (don't worry...one was a SCSI drive connected to a SCSI controller card ). Yeah...that thing was maxed out.

Oh...I mentioned earlier, what slots are your cards in? I makes a difference. On vp6-board.com I learned where, and where not, to put certain cards. (sorry topcat.....had to do a vp6-board plug.. )

[ncdave]

One of the niftiest tools in my toolbox is an AC/DC Amp-Clamp meter (UEI DL49). I used it to measure power drawn on each supply voltage on one of my Abit BP6 systems, first with two CPUs, and then with only one CPU.

The bottom line was that adding the 2nd CPU increased the amount of current drawn on the 5v supply, only. With only one CPU, none of the supply voltages were stressed at all: 5v was heaviest, with only about 8A drawn. With two CPUs, the current drawn on the 5v supply went up to about 14.5A, but none of the other current requirements went up noticably. 12v was loafing at 1.8A, and 3.3v was loafing at 1.0A, 5vSB maxed at 0.3A (with the system off), and the negative supplies measured zero current. This was with dual 366 MHz CPUs overclocked to ~500 MHz, and with 256 MB DRAM, one HDD, one CD/DVD drive, one diskette drive, and with low-end NIC, video & audio cards.

So, on the BP6, the CPU voltages are obviously regulated down from 5v, so the 5v supply is the main supply one that you should care about. But I don't know whether that is also true on the VP6.

-Dave