Asus boards got old n leakeage transistors

[Calchaqui]

Re: Asus boards got old n leakeage transistors

sry to hijack this thread *a bit* but what about asrock? since its a subsidiary of asus, it shud be as good right? asrock got those premium gold polymer caps thing on some of their boards. example. but they fail to specify exactly what brand and model of caps they use. hope its good too...

Most of all mobo makers use good caps in their High End Series...

[c_hegge]

Re: Asus boards got old n leakeage transistors

FWIW, ASRock are no longer owned by ASUS. I'm not really sure weather they got better or worse after the spin-off, though.

[momaka]

Re: Asus boards got old n leakeage transistors

I've found out why the Asus had power up problems (power up by itself, or do not power dont never) I thought that was a BIOS-CMOS-BATTERY circuit problem, but the one big transistor getting shorted is 10N03L in the VIO VRM the other one is a little affected too. Do you recommend me using my HeatGun http://cfnewsads.thomasnet.com/image...493/493185.jpg or what?, I already have the replacement fet.

Are you sure the transistor is shorted? Is this with the CPU removed or on the board? Because with the CPU on the board, the MOSFETs on the low side of the buck circuit will read as shorted or very low resistance.
I don't know if you will be able to remove it with that head gun alone. You'll possibly need a fairly bir iron too (50 W+) and lots of flux and solder.

I just finally put together my HP Netserver E800 last week with its ASUS CUR-DLS. It didn't want to boot at first like before. Not sure if this was the problem, but I found that the power switch on the front of the case wasn't making good contact (i.e. when I checked it with a multimeter, I couldn't get a stable low resistance when the switch was pressed). Cleaned the contacts on the switch and put it back in the computer the next day. Now it works fine every time. But again, I'm not sure if this was the problem or not. Because it use to do that before too - i.e. once the CMOS battery was placed and CMOS was saved properly, it would boot fine most of the time. But I guess now time will tell. I use that computer almost every other day or so (only as a torrent box - so it's headless and keyboard-less). If it starts doing that again, I'll report back here. So far so good, though .

Not all that related to this thread, but I recently revived an old socket 478 ECS motherboard (P4IBMS) that has a similar problem - sometimes it will boot and other times it will do nothing (not even try to spin the fans). I wonder if this is a somewhat common problem with older motherboards and when/why it happens. Although, I should also note that the previous owner of that board abused it quite a bit - one of the memory slots has heavily burned contacts in it while the other has missing latches, the NB heat sink was busted with its retention mechanism (had to solder those spring holders back in the board), and some of the old caps around the CPU were removed with brute force. So who knows what else it went through. Oh yeah, it also was attached to a gutless wonder PSU.

more or less a misnomer, that was true just a few years ago cause asus started to use tons of nvidia chipset boards, and those died for pretty much the nvidia chipset reason. NOW, I have yet to get an asus board within the past 2 years that died on me or any of my customers.

I disagree. Check eBay. Tons of "dead / for parts only / as-is" ASUS motherboards, many of them with chipsets other than nVidia. This is especially true if you try to look up any socket 939 and socket 775 motherboards.

And this is kind of off-topic too, but why are socket 939 motherboards so expensive??! Even the dead ones sell for $10+ and that's not including the shipping (which could be another $8-15).

[Calchaqui]

Re: Asus boards got old n leakeage transistors

Momaka, i bet that ASUS CUR-DLS will start showing that failure soon or later, it could be the Super I/O chip, i had a board that will no boot with the atx-pw-sw but will do shorting behing the atx connector, tracks to the pins were ok, has to be the ITE Super I/O chip

[momaka]

Re: Asus boards got old n leakeage transistors

It's possible. To be honest, I haven't touched that ASUS CUR-DLS motherboard after I put it back in my HP Netserver because it's been reliably turning on every time. Except for this last month, I used it quite heavily in the spring as a headless file server. I would have studied it a bit more, but I needed a second computer/server like that in my dorm, and this Netserver worked great for that.

Now that I've had it powered down for about a month (but with the CMOS battery still on the board), we will see if it will boot right. I'm pretty sure that if I remove the CMOS battery, it wouldn't.