TH7II raid capacitor replacements

[PeteS in CA]

Re: TH7II raid capacitor replacements

The PSU I have is noisy ...

Sounds like the fan in your P/S may be failing (are you sure it isn't the CPU fan?), which could reduce cooling. Also, if I understand correctly the cap has been in use, more or less, 24x7x52x5, so it could have been an end of life failure.

[jo-jo]

Re: TH7II raid capacitor replacements

Sounds like the fan in your P/S may be failing (are you sure it isn't the CPU fan?), which could reduce cooling. Also, if I understand correctly the cap has been in use, more or less, 24x7x52x5, so it could have been an end of life failure.

Ok, well it is not noisy, it is quite quiet, I just want it to be more quiet as this one is supposed to spend the rest of its life in the living room.

To my knowledge there is no foreign metal in there (I inspected it carefully last night), the case is well vented, has 3 fans drawing air through the back, plus the one in the PSU.

If the poorly seated sound card is not the culprit here, then I just have no clue as what might have caused this.

[Operandi]

Re: TH7II raid capacitor replacements

Five years is quite awhile but as long as the cooling is at least adequate I would expect them to go for much more then that. It looks like you have a Zalman 7xxx heatsink on the CPU so cooling around the CPU caps should have been very, very good which would only prolong their lifespan.

If it's not a power issue I would just assume that you have a rare "dud"; since you will be replacing the PSU anyway you should be covered either way.

For the PSU I would recommend the Seasonic S12 (the 330 watter should do) for it's build quality and extreme quietness.

[PeteS in CA]

Re: TH7II raid capacitor replacements

Just remember that quieter fans tend to be lower airflow, which means higher temps and shorter component lifespans.

[jo-jo]

Re: TH7II raid capacitor replacements

You can compensate for that by using larger fans, at least up to a point, and if you are willing to mod your case a bit by cutting a hole close to the PSU and fit an airduct (thin aluminum sheets are fine for that) over it which brings the outside air directly to the PSU intake, then you are in pretty good shape.

I have done that with one case, and actually I don't understand why they aren't designed that way to begin with. I plan to do this to my Ahanix when I have the time.

[jo-jo]

Re: TH7II raid capacitor replacements

Caps came today, thanks Chris, and I put them in. It was pretty straight forward thanks to the good guidelines here on this site.
However, in the meantime since Chris sent the caps, I tore the machine apart and found out that there were bad caps on the videocard as well. Could that have caused this?
Anyway, I put the cpu back on and the memory, and plugged an older card I have in. Now when I boot up the board sounds the annoying sirene alarm. When I checked the fanspeed, cpu temp and voltage in the monitoring program provided, it turns out that the Vcore voltage is too low, and that the +12V is low too, thus causing the alarm. And when I think about it (keep in mind that this is an old machine) this happened also many years ago (another PSU), and then I just lowered the lower limits and forgot about this, just assumed that the defaults in the monitoring program were set wrong to begin with. This was probably 4 y ago at least, and everithing ran fine since then until the caps blew few days ago.

So my question is: Is it possible that *too low* voltage can cause any damage like popping caps? Isn't it more likely that my caps blew because of the videocard? The ones that got damaged are close to the AGP bus.
OR... can that voltage problem be caused by my bad soldering? I mean, if I did not do that properly, the machine would simply not start - right? There is no way that a badly soldered cap can cause V fluctation? I actually think that I did this pretty well, and I am used to soldering, just not on multilayered boards like this is.

[Rainbow]

Re: TH7II raid capacitor replacements

Check the PSU for bad caps too.

[jo-jo]

Re: TH7II raid capacitor replacements

I did check it last night and the PSU is fine.