buy second-hand abit kt7a-raid?

[fcornillie]

Hi,

I'm still looking for a replacement mobo for my failed MSI k7t pro 2a, which I gave up after its caps started failing serially. I also couldn't unsolder some caps which were in a difficult position to extract from the board (caps between two pci slots).

Anyway, I've got the chance of buying a second-hand abit kt7a-raid. I've just emailed the seller to ask which caps are on the board, but the info on this site and forums tells me that they will probably be crap. The seller assures me that it is still running rock-solid. Is there any chance that this mobo will survive, and if not, is it difficult to recap, in any case more difficult than the MSI board?

Thanks in advance.

[makk]

Re: buy second-hand abit kt7a-raid?

I found that the hardest caps to replace on the KT7A are the two caps between the AGP slot and adjacent PCI slot. They are two 1500uf 6.3V caps, and they are right next to each other, and between two slots, so they are more tricky than the others since there is less room to manoeuvre and also difficult to see where the leads are going.

I have two of these boards, and my experience seems to suggest that the three 1500uf 6.3V caps near the AGP slot are the first to go bad.

On 1 of my boards, they were bulged, and after a while the machine would boot with "no video card" POST error beeps (with an AGP card), but would boot fine with a PCI video card.

On my other board, they were not visibly bad but I would get frequent blue screen errors indicating an error with an Nvidia device driver, and frequent random rebooting.

Having recapped these two boards, they are running remarkably well, I would even go far to say they are working better than when they were brand new.