Help Me Recap my IC7-G max II

[TFlight]

Hi Everybody,
I'm new to these forums. I have an older system with an IC7-G Max II board that has some bad caps around the CPU Power Section of the board. The ones that are swelled up and have the tell-tale brown crust are 6.3v 2200 microfarad electolytic Rubycons. I suspect they might be counterfeit, because they do not have the "K" type marking like they should...they have an equlilateral tri type vent stamping in the top of the cans. This rig has not been booted up. These caps failed while the rig was sitting in a closet, so I'm fairly certain I can salavage the rig.

I would like to replace the caps with better qualituy caps, or even get rid of the electrolytics, and replace them with Polys, but I see there are some rules to follow, and I'm not real sure of all the rules, and the exceptions to those rules.

I'd like help from the pros on recapping this board, because I wnat to be sure I can salavage it and make it last over the long haul. This system in it's day was one of the highest end OC'ing rigs you could get, and I plan to use it in conjunction with many other rigs in a flight simulator setup. The board is now irreplaceable, because ABit is no longer in buisness.

Any help you could provide would be much appreciated.

[bigbeark]

Re: Help Me Recap my IC7-G max II

If they are MBZ Rubycons they should be dark blue with a gold stripe and a K vent. MBZs in 6.3v 2200uf measure 10 x 20mm.

I would replace the leaking ones with new 6.3V 2200 MBZ Rubycons and see if the board boots up and works properly before getting into Poly conversion.

Socket 478 CPUs with the Prescott core get pretty hot. If you are going to do heavy-duty gaming/video work you need a better cooling system than stock. Liquid cooling makes sense for the NetBurst CPUs.

I use a solid copper heatsink on my GigaByte i875 board but even that's not enough for heavy-duty use.

[TFlight]

Re: Help Me Recap my IC7-G max II

Yep, cooling is already taken care of on that rig. It was OC'd before, but will be reduced some. I'm mainly using this as a second computer on my flight simultor that will be used for displays in the cockpit.

This is an F-16 simulator. It doesn't take a massively strong rig for that or even high end video cards...just something that is capable of supporting 5 small low res monitors. It does this by being networked to the main rig, and the programs that output the data to the screens are brough up and those hit the shared memory of the simualtor and they output the data. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the general idea.

This old rig is perfect for that. I also have to admit that I kinda have an attachment to that rig because when it was new and I built it I actually set a record doing some performance benchmarking with it.

The reason I was leaning more toward poly caps is because I do not want that leaking to occur again. I want to makew that computer very reliable and last, because it's old, and irreplaceable, and it can do a job for me and actually do it better than some of the new hardware believe it or not.

That old board with the 3.2 Prescott (yes I'm well versed in the "preshott's" hehe) did some amazing things back in it's day, and it has some sentimetal value. I want to make sure it can do some amazing things again in a different way, but want to make sure it lasts over the long haul.