Re: SOYO P4I845GVISA PLUS - Bad Caps Confirmed



Yep. They're not very good in our experience! That's why I replaced them all.

I will say that it was a royal pain cleaning out the holes for some of the caps where they have large areas of foil on both sides of the board that are both connected directly to the lead-holes.

Apparently whoever did the board layout for Soyo has ever heard of a thermal relief.

Then again, they probably cannot imagine in their wildest dreams that anyone would actually repair a motherboard...

Re: warning!xcelite flush cutters!

Yes. Flush cutting dykes are good for several reasons:

1. They cut flush, leaving a square end to the lead rather than a sharp, pointed end that's more dangerous.

2. They impart far less shock (g-force) to the component (as long as you use them the correct direction!)

But, you must also be aware that most flush or semi-flush-cutting dykes will propel the cut-off lead out at a high rate of speed. Wear eye protection or make sure to hold/capture the flying leads!

I think you could damage...

Just another data point for everyone.

We've got about ten SOYO P4I845GVISA PLUS motherboards in use for data acquisition systems because they've got three ISA slots to support legacy ISA data acq boards.

We've recently had three of them fail within about a month of each other. One had operated for about 9 months. One for about a year and a half, and the other had operated for only a few weeks.

Inspection of all three bad ones shows that many of the caps in the CPU core voltage conversion area are bulged and have leaked out their tops.

...

Re: The Recapping FAQ

I agree with a lot of that. I've been an electronics tech and designer since the mid 1970s, and I have de-soldered and re-soldered thousands if not hundreds of thousands of devices.

I greatly prefer using a [I][B]good[/B][/I] solder sucker over any other means of removing old solder. You need a [I]good[/I] solder sucker and you need to clean it fairly frequently to keep it from barfing out bits of solder. Lubrication is paramount. I prefer Teflon-bearing silicone grease (they used to provide this with RF connectors).

When the sucker...