865 Boards Albatron / Asus re Capacitors

[willawake]

Had the opportunity to see some boards at a clients. I was surprised to see Albatron using very good caps on their boards.

Albatron 865PE Pro - All big caps Sanyo WG, All small United Chemi Con KZG.
Albatron 865PE Pro II - didnt get a good look when i was installing but saw a lot of Sanyo and Panasonic for the large caps.

Then we have one of the kings of quality namely Asus with their flagship 875 chipset board P4C800-E Deluxe (a later model prescott ready). Which has 4 large United Chemi Con KZE and the rest are OST including a row of very closely spaced 8mm width OST next to the CPU. (A recapping nightmare).

What the hell happened to ASUS, where are the Rubycons. Very dissapointing and very suprising for Albatron which I consider a budget choice.

P4C800-E Deluxe pic



The thing is that the manufacturers include all this crap in the boxes like all these connector plates, sata power converters, sata cables, crappy software - most of which you are not going to use. Reducing some of the crap could free up some money to have all good caps on the board.

[yanz]

hmm, i remember that ecs use those OST on ECS 741GX too... and it's not easy to find 8mm diameter caps with capacitance above 1500uF...

[willawake]

lol...which bastard made that row. wanna recap that sucker soon for my new gaming/encoding/burning rig. need 7 1500 6.3 8mm and its not even close to my birthday sniff.....anyone got working mods for that row on the p4800c-e got all sorts of 10mm panny FC.

[kc8adu]

the shop got in an albatron p4 board and i looked it over.
it had high quality parts throughout.
i remember them being cheapies too.
i guess that is one way to make a name for yourself.
and shame on asus.ost are well known crap and have been for a while.
no excuse.

[willawake]

CEO of Albatron is co-founder of Gigabyte. i used to be wary of their products but not now. last few comps i build for people used albatron boards. they are consistent with good caps now. availability is good here also as a major chain stocks their range. got a few albatron graphics cards also, nice with good caps except for the minor ones.

used this board PX865PE7C Pro which is socket 775 but with AGP. quite a lot of savings using ddr ram and agp card rather than ddr2 and pcix

are they really high quality parts throughout or is there some cost cutting somewhere?

[MD Willington]

hmm, i remember that ecs use those OST on ECS 741GX too... and it's not easy to find 8mm diameter caps with capacitance above 1500uF...

Most Pou Chen Group boards (ECS/PCC et all) use Luxon or OST...

[willawake]

Re: 865 Boards Albatron / Asus re Capacitors

got an Albatron PX865PEC Pro (i865,s478) today. Cheapie board. Has the major caps as Sanyo WG and Chemicon KZG but the rest are G-LUXON 1000uf 10v darn i didnt expect that.

think i will recap it though and keep it cos it is a nice board and it will still come in way cheaper than competing boards after the recapping.

In the meantime though since i dont have any caps and i need a 478 board soon with good caps so i will go looking for an Intel 865GBFL if i can find one.

i can order for sure, there is availability but i dont want to do that and find it is old stock with nichicon HN HM etc. and get a double dissapointment.

it is kinda shitty situation with albatron / intel at the moment. one of the major chains used to stock a full range of albatron and now albatron has discontinued making new boards they have switched to.............wait for it.................ASUS dammit. they have 17 different ASUS boards for sale??????

other suppliers which i used to use for intel boards have dropped intel like a stone after the HN HM problems.

[willawake]

Re: 865 Boards Albatron / Asus re Capacitors

talking about asus again....here is an asus 6600gt having a little polymer party on board with oscon G radial, oscon svp chip type, a chemicon polymer chip type but who invited Skywell with their 2x uni-con 330uf 16v? yuck! soon to be recapped with oscon sep same values. lol even the small caps are sanyo although 85oC cough cough





one of the interesting things about that pcb is the apparent ability to use either chip type or radial caps on the same pcb design, depending on what is available. Asus are still doing their + and - backwards though.

[tylerlough]

Re: 865 Boards Albatron / Asus re Capacitors

That's a nice card, I'm thinking about getting a 6600GT because my 5200 ultra is kinda slow with the latest games. An Evga 6600GT is only $119 (98 euro) after rebates. Right now is seems like the best performance in the $100 price range. That Evga card has a lifetime warranty that isn't voided by overclocking. Does that asus have all the performance you can handle or could you use a bit more.

[willawake]

Re: 865 Boards Albatron / Asus re Capacitors



looks like the same card. funny warranty though cos its a hot card and you can burn it if you are not careful with overclocking (need to monitor temps at the settings you choose). if you are on a budget i would say go for it. you should definitely see noticable difference from 5200. I am not really the person to ask about gpu and gaming though, i just like to play a bit of racing (nfs hp2 at the moment). You should also consider 6800gs (around $200) and 7800gs (difficult to find at the moment and $350) though, if you have more money to spend. There is no pipelines to unlock using rivatuner with the 6600gt (can overclock though) but there is with the 6800gs i believe. There is also noticable difference with the 6800gs when compared to the 6600gt according to forum posts, some posters were much happier with the 6800gs.

[smokinkane]

Re: 865 Boards Albatron / Asus re Capacitors

I have a little input on the the Albatron px865pe pro II, I have had this board for 2 1/2 years and it has been great except for a little problem. Probably 6 months ago, I randoming started having blue screen reboots, I checked everything except the caps. Finally, I checked the caps and 3 or 4 of them were leaking or bulging. So I shipped the board back to the company under warranty (they were slow) but got the board back with 8 new caps. The board has been working well again until about 2 weeks ago, it started the same rebooting. I assume its bad caps again, so this time I will replace them myself, with some good caps (don't know which brand to get yet). Here is the thing, I think that running at the default clock speed and voltages the caps would probably never go bad, but I run my 2.4c at 3.4ghz and all my voltages are evelated, memory being at the max. So I guess eventhough they might use some good bad caps, I believe they may be a little underrated for an overclocker. So now my question which brand should I go with and purchase from where? digikey? Thanks

[willawake]

Re: 865 Boards Albatron / Asus re Capacitors

what caps did they use for the repair and how long did they last.

overclocking would not affect the caps because of additional voltage as they are rated much higher than you would ever apply during overclocking.

pm Topcat who is the owner of the forums for a quote for selling you caps.

[smokinkane]

Re: 865 Boards Albatron / Asus re Capacitors

I didn't do the recapping, Albatron did, and I haven't checked out what brand they used, although I did notice they were a different color than the old ones.

[tylerlough]

Re: 865 Boards Albatron / Asus re Capacitors

Hi smokinkane, I have that same Albatron board with 3 bad caps round the northbridge/ram area. See my thread about it here I replaced all the GSC brand 8mm caps with nichicons brand HE series(not the best brand but it is one of them).
Overclocking produces extra heat around the ram and cpu so his could possibly shorten capacitor life.
One other thing to look at is bad capacitors in your power supply, I had two bad caps in mine. Just be careful when opening P/S, only open it if it is out of warranty.
Now I haven't had any random reboots or blue sceens.
Would like to see some pictures if possible

[smokinkane]

Re: 865 Boards Albatron / Asus re Capacitors

I will take some pics tonight. I read your thread, and was thinking of getting the Panasonic FM series as a replacement, but may go with something else. This is the second time this board has had these symptoms, and its really annoying, so I want to get the best caps possible to last the longest. I will going to buy caps with a little higher UF on the same voltage hoping to get more stable power. I just replaced my thermaltake 485 power supply, with a sunbeam 550, so I don't think I have a power supply problem since this was going on before the switch. What brand caps should I use? I overclock from 2.4ghz to 3.4ghz so I push things to the limit.

[tylerlough]

Re: 865 Boards Albatron / Asus re Capacitors

Ok then no power supply problem. here are good brands
1) Rubycon (Top cat's personal favorite)
2) Sanyo/Nippon
3) Nichicon
4) Mallory
5) Panasonic
you can go up in voltage if you need to

[willawake]

Re: 865 Boards Albatron / Asus re Capacitors

When albatron use good caps they use Sanyo or Chemicon. Panasonic FM are great caps and rated for 5000 hours which is ok. If you want higher endurance then nichicon.

i havent compared all caps yet to find out the optimum ones available. you can check https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=425 item no.3

basically you want the lowest esr and higher values for ripple current and endurance. depends what is available though.

what values of caps failed on your board anyway? generally it is the 1000 6.3v or 1000 10v that fail on those boards and usually because they used a crappy brand. I would just use the same values.

[smokinkane]

Re: 865 Boards Albatron / Asus re Capacitors

I pulled the board out of the case this morning so that I can inspect the caps. When Albatron recapped the board they used Sanyo WG caps, but they didn't replace all the caps. Their are still some GSC caps by the northbridge and around the AGP slot. I have examined my board pretty closely and it doesn't look like I have any bulging and leaking caps, but there almost has to be some that are bad. Since the rig has the exact same symptoms as before, so do you guys think I should just replace the all the caps or just the left over GSC caps? I included a couple pics and how do I get the caps TomKat supplies, are they expensive?

[smokinkane]

Re: 865 Boards Albatron / Asus re Capacitors

Here is a list of the caps on the board now including brand and location:

Caps around processor- 16v 1800uf= 3 Sanyo WG
6.3v 2200uf=3 Sanyo WG
2.5v 820uf=4 Yellow/Black don't know
10v 1000uf=1 GSC

Northbridge & Agp- 16v 470uf=5 GSC
16v 100uf=4 GSC
10v 1000uf=1 GSC

Around Memory- 6.3v 1000uf=8 Sanyo WG
10v 1000uf=2 GSC
16v 100uf=4 GSC

Other Random- 6.3v 1000uf=1 Sanyo WG
16v 470uf=1 GSC

I think I might go out on a limb and assume all the gsc's are bad, since all the sanyo's are only 4-5 months old. The GSC's are the originals, I don't know why they didn't recap those when I sent the board in 4-5 months ago. The instability could definitely be from the northbridge not getting good power. Also it seems that ever since I installed my logitech g15 keyboard and mx610 mouse that the reboots started. So basically pulling more power from the motherboard's usb. I did remove both keyboard and mouse and installed the old stuff, to make sure they weren't the problem.

[Rainbow]

Re: 865 Boards Albatron / Asus re Capacitors

Yes, try replacing all the GSCs. Replacing that crap never hurts.