Re: Strange liquid on damaged GTX1080 card

It's not conductive, but it may cause slight issues.
Few years back I had a couple of cards in my workshop from one of my office neighbors, which started artifacting all of a sudden (HD7970 and GTX1080Ti). At first I thought it was either GPU or VRAM issue, but then I took off the heatsink and saw a flood of slimy thermal pad snot all over and under GDDR5 chips. Just a quick IPA bath, and some scrubbing fixed the issue on both cards.

But in your particular case, I doubt it caused that cap to die. Just a typical defective/cracked...

Re: 6.3 volt 1800uf caps

Just replace with any low-ESR equivalent. You can find cheap Nichicon or Chemi-con caps that fit the bill for pennies.
Also, those old sAM2 and LGA775 machines are less sensitive to ripple on VRM, which for all intents and purposes translates to "use whatever you have with a nearest equivalent spec". For a >10y.o. machine a "slightly off-spec" cheap chinese capacitor is better than dried-out or blown old capacitor. Since it's on the CPU VRM, it's probably a good idea to replace all caps at once, and try to avoid mismatching...

Re: need advice for buying a new Programmer


It boils down to quality and "best bang for the buck".

Here's a quick snips of the internals (there are more equally crappy versions of this, but that's the only one I found):


Basically, if you ignore that dubious "offline copy" feature, it doesn't do anything that you can't accomplish with a $2.50-$3.00 CH341 programmer.

It doesn't have proper TTL control : only drops VCC/RST to a ballpark of 3.3V (whatever Vdrop on that diode and tranistors, basically),...

Re: PCG-71316L does not turn on

Does PU19 get hot immediately after you plug in the charger or battery?
Did you check other rails (+5VALW_LDO, +12V)? Maybe PU9 is short?

Re: need advice for buying a new Programmer

Depends on your daily tasks. If, for example, all you need is something that can flash SPI/I2C chips on mainstream electronics, then your best bet is Flashcat USB with some adapters. I've been using an older variant as a daily driver for nearly 5 years. Later got a "Pro" version from devs for a little favor, which was even more solid and flexible. It also does JTAG and NAND (but kinda clunky). All new versions support 1.8/3.3/5V and can do QSPI as well.

Buspirate is also pretty cool, but I haven't had a chance to...

Re: Trying to identify 2 missing components on PCB of a Huawei smartwatch.



Appears to be a pair of schottky diodes on USB D+/D-. Those are just pogo pins that go straight out the other side, directly to charge port.
I can safely assume they have nothing to do with fast battery discharging, so your best bet is to look what's going on with charge controller....

Re: Aliexpress LGA2011 X79 motherboards

I hate all of those.
With X99 at least you don't gamble that much on chipset(either x99 or C612), but chinese x79 are a total mess of mismatch-reballed hubs: one person gets X79, next one - B75 or H67 etc.
Had about a dozen of those in my workshop 2 years ago - all with either dead PCH, or blown VRM, or both at the same time.

The best alternative is to get a used HP Z420/Z620, Dell T3600 or Lenovo S30. All of those are as cheap as chinese crap, but they are built to spec with full feature set, and are meant to do...

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

I've been putting this on a backburner for nearly a decade...
Greetings, fellow knights of solder and iron!