Biostar M7MKE Slot A

[dood]

This one's an oldy, but still works fine. Not sure if it's worth the recap, but the owner is rebuilding the machine and I get to keep the old stuff... It's running an Athlon 650mhz.

Three bulged caps, but all the rest are likely to go sooner or later, and it's not looking like a fun recap...

[Rainbow]

Re: Biostar M7MKE Slot A

Slot A Athlons are rare. And boards for them even more (because, guess what, many end with bad caps). I have ECS/PC Chips Slot A board with AMD chipset and the caps are still good (and one of them is Oscon )

[AK0R]

Re: Biostar M7MKE Slot A

This one's an oldy, but still works fine. Not sure if it's worth the recap, but the owner is rebuilding the machine and I get to keep the old stuff... It's running an Athlon 650mhz.

Three bulged caps, but all the rest are likely to go sooner or later, and it's not looking like a fun recap...

That's about half as bad as a BE6-II, which has 19 of its 22 majors between the CPU socket and the interface connectors, and that board was a piece of cake. CPU should come out of the socket OK, and accessibility on your board isn't bad at all. Would make a fine router.

[dood]

Re: Biostar M7MKE Slot A

Hell, I could slap XP on this thing for someone who needs a cheaper internet PC. Would need a case and a stick of RAM, but that wouldn't be so bad. 650mhz is enough to run XP, or I could throw a fresh load of 98 on it and see what happens!

[willawake]

Re: Biostar M7MKE Slot A

fuck 98

2k is less resource intensive and will be fine on 650 especially if 256 ram

[dood]

Re: Biostar M7MKE Slot A

I'm loading XP on a spare drive right now just to see how it performs. It does have 256mb RAM, and I could easily take it to 512 and help the performance a lot more. Once I get the board out of the case, I'll check the values of the offending caps and see how much it'll cost me to recap the board.

[dood]

Re: Biostar M7MKE Slot A

Seems resonably quick in XP, even with 256mb RAM, and an old-ass 6.4gb HD. Maybe I'll keep it for a crunching machine. Not sure what Athlon650 it is... could be any of the three revisions that there were... guess I'd just have to check the numbers.

[dood]

Re: Biostar M7MKE Slot A

ALL of the caps on this mobo are "GL" caps. The ones that failed are right next to those heatsinks, so I'm thinking it was just a matter of heat that killed them. And, when I say ALL, I mean, every single cap, all the way down to the 10uf 6.3 volt "can barely read the label" caps. It's downloading all the windows updates since sp2 right now

I guess I'll order the caps to do this one, seems they're all 1500uf 6.3v and there's a total of 12 of them. A look on the back of the motherboard shows that they're all fairly open and easy to get to, with no little stray traces around.

[dood]

Re: Biostar M7MKE Slot A

Successfully recapped this board today. Used Nichicon 1500uf 6.3v to replace the GL caps. I'll post some pics of the dead GL caps and the recapped board. I only did the four caps next to the heatsinks, because of being tight for space. Those were the only ones effected, and I think it was just a matter of heat being an issue for them. The rest should be fine for the remainder of the useful life of this board.

Customer has decided to keep this machine in service, so I don't get to keep the board . But at least it'll be reliable for him.

[dood]

Re: Biostar M7MKE Slot A

Old cap next to new Nichicon cap:







Board works fine, except for flakey USB ports, but I think that's just the board, not the fault of any caps.

[Cyborg]

Re: Biostar M7MKE Slot A

Old topic... but I felt like answering...

I've just (successfully) recapped one of these boards. They used the worst capacitors they could find, really. Mine were Choyos all around. Despite this, the board is quite good.

[dood]

Re: Biostar M7MKE Slot A

glad to hear your recap was successful, as well