Awesome, I knew you'd know it all.

So I'm going to forget about the video card, it also had the fan die on it (stupid bushing based fans!) and it 'cooked' the chipset pretty well just before this happened (in the midst of a game)... that was why I assumed the RAMDAC part of the wafer melted itself (but wasn't sure why that didn't bomb out the rest of the cards function). Lost cause. Was going to be more of a soldering practice exercise whereas if I melt everything it doesn't matter since it's basically something I should have tossed a while ago.

The motherboard...

I know and can easily identify the basic (large) electolytic type caps, easily. But, having found this site wondering why my BP6 was a bit flaky (and a BE6-II also) and having the revelation that some of my other 'bad' hardware could be suspect I figured it was time to start checking.

In this pic, I show a section of a Digital Alpha (22164A, 500MHz RISC) motherboard that decided it didn't like ANY kind of memory anymore (bios beeps out 'no memory' code even if loaded up with approved types). I stored it away for the last couple years (packrat, yes) and went and dug it up and checked...