Well, I decided to do the kids Gigabyte GA-7VKMLS board tonight. The "before" state wasn't really much to talk about as there weren't any real problems with the machine. All the caps looked in good shape. Had Sanyo WG series 
for the 3300uF and 1200 uF, and Supacon 
for the 1000uF. Decided that I might as well do it now rather than chance getting into the mess I got into with my GA-7VAXP (see my other post).
So why recap a working machine? Well, the kids had a problem with some random reboots a few months back, but they seemed to go away after I [by chance] removed the power supply and reinstalled it. However, I don't really buy that as a true fix. What I believe is that the problems were just the leading edge of a hardware [capacitor] issue that would likely get worse with time. I know that the MINIDUMP history of my GA-7VAXP showed the exact same behavior ... brief periods of problems followed by long periods of nothing ... until the caps were on their last leg. Of course, only then did the problems got progressively worse (albeit slowly) over a period of 6 months. If you've spent any time in the electronics industry, I'm sure you have run across this behavior. It's the nature of the hardware beast.
Attached are some pics of the recapped board. No problems recapping. Disassembled system, recapped, reassembled, and POST in around 3 hours. Used a 40W solder iron with pencil tip. Heated old cap leads from underside of board using a "wet" solder tip (i.e., has a little solder on the tip) and gently rocked caps back and forth out of board. Used wet tip and rocking procedure to get new caps in. Once installed, I trimmed all new leads to around 1.5-2.0mm. Then I fluxed, and used a wet solder tip touched the tip of the new cap lead. I did have to worked a little harder to get solder onto a few of the cap leads, but I always finished the joint by heating the tip of the cap lead - the joint fills in nicely doing it like this. I used no-clean flux and solder, but I'm anal, so I cleaned the new joints with some board cleaner. Finally I TRIPLE CHECKED ALL JOINTS looking for NO SOLDER, LOOSE JOINT, EXCESS SOLDER, SOLDER ON ADJACENT AREAS, DESOLDERING OF NON-TARGET COMPONENTS, and PROPER CAPCITOR LOCATION. Yes I actually installed one of the new caps in the wrong location - thank goodness Gigabyte had a hi-res image of the board on their site!
Enjoy!
for the 3300uF and 1200 uF, and Supacon for the 1000uF. Decided that I might as well do it now rather than chance getting into the mess I got into with my GA-7VAXP (see my other post).So why recap a working machine? Well, the kids had a problem with some random reboots a few months back, but they seemed to go away after I [by chance] removed the power supply and reinstalled it. However, I don't really buy that as a true fix. What I believe is that the problems were just the leading edge of a hardware [capacitor] issue that would likely get worse with time. I know that the MINIDUMP history of my GA-7VAXP showed the exact same behavior ... brief periods of problems followed by long periods of nothing ... until the caps were on their last leg. Of course, only then did the problems got progressively worse (albeit slowly) over a period of 6 months. If you've spent any time in the electronics industry, I'm sure you have run across this behavior. It's the nature of the hardware beast.
Attached are some pics of the recapped board. No problems recapping. Disassembled system, recapped, reassembled, and POST in around 3 hours. Used a 40W solder iron with pencil tip. Heated old cap leads from underside of board using a "wet" solder tip (i.e., has a little solder on the tip) and gently rocked caps back and forth out of board. Used wet tip and rocking procedure to get new caps in. Once installed, I trimmed all new leads to around 1.5-2.0mm. Then I fluxed, and used a wet solder tip touched the tip of the new cap lead. I did have to worked a little harder to get solder onto a few of the cap leads, but I always finished the joint by heating the tip of the cap lead - the joint fills in nicely doing it like this. I used no-clean flux and solder, but I'm anal, so I cleaned the new joints with some board cleaner. Finally I TRIPLE CHECKED ALL JOINTS looking for NO SOLDER, LOOSE JOINT, EXCESS SOLDER, SOLDER ON ADJACENT AREAS, DESOLDERING OF NON-TARGET COMPONENTS, and PROPER CAPCITOR LOCATION. Yes I actually installed one of the new caps in the wrong location - thank goodness Gigabyte had a hi-res image of the board on their site!
Enjoy!
Attached Files
