Iwill DVD266U-RN with Bad Caps

[Topcat]

This one is definitely one for the books. While its been known for some time that Hermei caps were not the best of quality, this is the first DVD266u-RN I've seen this bad off. I've never seen one before with vented caps. This customer sent me 2 of them, both with vented Hermei's. This was the worst of the 2.







Upon recapping, the board is working fine. I had issues early on after recapping, turns out the RAM is bad. The DIMM has Nanya chips, which has never been a brand I've had the best luck with, so I can't blame the bad caps for the killed RAM.

[kc8adu]

Re: Iwill DVD266U-RN with Bad Caps

had one here last week with purple/gold hermei caps
they were still flat but a peek at vcore showed .7v p-p of crap.
a recap fixed it up.
these have beed known as cranky quirky boards.could these caps be part of this?
most were .5-.6 ohm esr which is bad for this type of cap.

[Topcat]

Re: Iwill DVD266U-RN with Bad Caps

I've had a lot of experience with these boards. I have a modded BIOS I made for it, which helps stability, and implements the latest RAID firmware.

http://www.kabalsrealm.com/index.php?op=download;id=4

[PeteS in CA]

Re: Iwill DVD266U-RN with Bad Caps

I'm doing very different stuff, but one of the caps (a Nichicon) I have in an ongoing stress test is triple its initial ESR and isn't swollen.

When you look at the ripple, the part to look at is the VRM switch frequency component. The spikes are probably noise radiated into the ground lead of your 'scope.

[kc8adu]

Re: Iwill DVD266U-RN with Bad Caps

I'm doing very different stuff, but one of the caps (a Nichicon) I have in an ongoing stress test is triple its initial ESR and isn't swollen.

When you look at the ripple, the part to look at is the VRM switch frequency component. The spikes are probably noise radiated into the ground lead of your 'scope.

well aware of that.not a problem here.i had to use a well shielded lead on the old tek 214 to keep ignition crap out when looking at o2,ks,ect.
which series nichicons are you stress testing?

[Topcat]

Re: Iwill DVD266U-RN with Bad Caps

This one has been running rock solid since the recap and BIOS update. After the BIOS update, it plays nice with his RAM now, where before it would crash constantly and fail diagnostics. This has been one of the most reliable ones I've worked with, and the first I actually recapped. I havent had my scope out since I moved to my new shop, I only use it when I get a troublesome board. Smaller issues I can usually chase out with my meter alone. If I have to break out the scope, its an expensive board, that's actually worth fixing....

[PeteS in CA]

Re: Iwill DVD266U-RN with Bad Caps

PM, PR, PJ, PW, and HE so far

[Matt_Li]

Hello, Topcat

I know this is an ancient post , but .... I recently purchased a Iwill DVD266U-RN board from Japan.

just have 2 questions if you can give any advice,

1 ...... the caps are obvious dead, I am going to recap them, I prefer using solid caps ( sanyo, coz no need to do it again for ever i believe ) , but most solid caps dont have same value as electric caps (unable to find and no need to i think).


1. for 13 dark green 6.3v1000u caps (in PCI AGP area) , i'll use 6.3v560u
2. for 9 purple 6.3v1500u caps (in ram area ), ill use 6.3v820u
3. for 4 blue 6.3v4700u caps (cpu area) , 4 blue 10v2200u (cpu area) and 2 dark green 10v1500u (ram area), i'll have to use 16v1000u (this is the biggest one for sanyo solid caps)

are they feasible ? coz this is my first time to recap ....


2... a silly question, on the back of the mb, the melding point terminal of some caps is quite close to its surrounding metal area, just a hair of tiny gap, what if they connected/touched if my welding job is not good enough .... , will the cap shorted ?

any suggestions will be appreciate.

Thanks.

[Topcat]

Hello, Topcat

I know this is an ancient post , but .... I recently purchased a Iwill DVD266U-RN board from Japan.

just have 2 questions if you can give any advice,

1 ...... the caps are obvious dead, I am going to recap them, I prefer using solid caps ( sanyo, coz no need to do it again for ever i believe ) , but most solid caps dont have same value as electric caps (unable to find and no need to i think).


1. for 13 dark green 6.3v1000u caps (in PCI AGP area) , i'll use 6.3v560u
2. for 9 purple 6.3v1500u caps (in ram area ), ill use 6.3v820u
3. for 4 blue 6.3v4700u caps (cpu area) , 4 blue 10v2200u (cpu area) and 2 dark green 10v1500u (ram area), i'll have to use 16v1000u (this is the biggest one for sanyo solid caps)

are they feasible ? coz this is my first time to recap ....


2... a silly question, on the back of the mb, the melding point terminal of some caps is quite close to its surrounding metal area, just a hair of tiny gap, what if they connected/touched if my welding job is not good enough .... , will the cap shorted ?

any suggestions will be appreciate.

Thanks.

Sorry for the slow reply....I don't frequent BCN as much as I used to...

Always thrilled to see someone build one of these, they were great boards once you hit their sweet spot; which could be challenging sometimes!! Honestly, for reliability issues, I'd recap it in good lytics. If you choose to polymod, my first choice is Nichicon LG series; rule of thumb is half the cap's rated capacitance....but the closer the better.

I actually still have a DVD266u-RN in my retro fleet with a voodoo5 in it....

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/genera...ill-dvd266u-rn

The voodoo5 wasn't in it when that thread was created, it was added later....but you can see the recapping job.

[Matt_Li]

Hi Topcat,

happy to hear from you.

I saw that post as well. can you also please share the back view of the motherboard , just want to see the terminals of those caps.

thanks.

[Topcat]

Hi Topcat,

happy to hear from you.

I saw that post as well. can you also please share the back view of the motherboard , just want to see the terminals of those caps.

thanks.

I'll see if I have any shots of the back, but I doubt I do....

[Matt_Li]

Hello topcat,

i have finished the recap and all good , but has 2 probs.

1. i plugged 2 piii-1.4s, but can only detected 2x700Mhz.
2. i cannot boot with 4G ram, even with 3G, sometimes it's stuck on ram checking. (i am using corsair 4x1G dedicated ram)

can you share any reasons?

thanks a lot.

[Topcat]

Hello topcat,

i have finished the recap and all good , but has 2 probs.

1. i plugged 2 piii-1.4s, but can only detected 2x700Mhz.
2. i cannot boot with 4G ram, even with 3G, sometimes it's stuck on ram checking. (i am using corsair 4x1G dedicated ram)

can you share any reasons?

thanks a lot.

You need to set the FSB speed. It's default @ 66 (locked multiplier of 10.5), which is why you're only @ 700MHz. It sees both CPU's....good sign. You have to manually key it in, set it to 133, CPU's will show the correct speed then. If you're feeling frisky, you can try setting it higher....150 wasn't unheard of with these boards with good RAM & cooling....and of course chips that were friendly...but before venturing there, get it running correctly first.

I never was able to get 4GB to run right in this board either; it's not 'officially' supported by the chipset either even though some claim it can do it. I've gotten it to run on 4GB (boot reliably), but it was never really stable. 2GB seems to be the happy place....and on a 32 bit system running XP or Win2k, it's really plenty. I'm running 4x 512mb Micron modules in mine and don't have any memory related issues that this chipset was notorious for.

[Matt_Li]

Hi very happy to see your comment.

it's correct, i've checked the 'iwill smart setting', and the default is 66mhz, not sure why, i had a supermicro P3TDDE, which can by default let PIII-1.4s run at 1.4GHz, and can use 4x1G pc-133 rams without issues. thus i guess this dvd266u-rn can do as well.

the ram info, i checked it from here : https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/iwill-dvd266u-rn there is the official pdf , at page 15, with a section mentioned max system memory up to 4GB.

and fyi, i please check my shared post-recap photo , i think it's a beauty , haha.

[Matt_Li]

+

[Topcat]

Hi very happy to see your comment.

it's correct, i've checked the 'iwill smart setting', and the default is 66mhz, not sure why, i had a supermicro P3TDDE, which can by default let PIII-1.4s run at 1.4GHz, and can use 4x1G pc-133 rams without issues. thus i guess this dvd266u-rn can do as well.

the ram info, i checked it from here : https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/iwill-dvd266u-rn there is the official pdf , at page 15, with a section mentioned max system memory up to 4GB.

and fyi, i please check my shared post-recap photo , i think it's a beauty , haha.

Looks good. I still have a P3TDDE as well. It's a sdram board versus the DDR of the u-rn...both nearly impossible to find these days. Now to grab yourself a voodoo5 for yours. The perfect icing on the cake GPU for one of these.

[Matt_Li]

yeah, thank mate.

do you have any idea that why the official pdf says it can support up to 4G DDR1 but when i plugged 4x1G corsair DDR1, it cannot boot at all, with 3x1G sometimes it's stuck while checking rams.

do you have any chance to try 4x1G on yours ? and i can confirm nothing to do with my recap work, because the issue happened even before the recap work.

many thanks.

[Matt_Li]

and fyi, i was using corsair cmx1024-3500LLPro RGB rams. i found your post :

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/genera...ill-dvd266u-rn

you was saying if use 4G non-ecc ram, it runs well, are they ddr400 or ddr266? because when i plugged in 4 dimms, just beep, no signal on screen, but 3G is working well.

Thanks.

[Topcat]

and fyi, i was using corsair cmx1024-3500LLPro RGB rams. i found your post :

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/genera...ill-dvd266u-rn

you was saying if use 4G non-ecc ram, it runs well, are they ddr400 or ddr266? because when i plugged in 4 dimms, just beep, no signal on screen, but 3G is working well.

Thanks.

I honestly don't remember what make they were, but they would have been PC2100, no doubt.