To replace all or not to replace all... it is always a sticky question of risk balance. I'm usually in the "replace what must be replaced and maybe the rest from the same brand of capacitor if you replaced a few of them already" camp. There is always a risk of damaging the board and components when removing any component so if you stick to replacing what you have to, you might reduce the risk of unnecessary damage. That said, boards from that era generally were a question of "when", not "if" the capacitors fail and once I determined the board was functional as you have, I'd carefully consider proactively replacing whatever else I could find on the board that might need it.
Sounds very reasonable and probably what I'm going to do as well. The caps that look good also performed well. What worries me a bit is that the caps from this board looked way better than the ones from the P4B, but I feel the ones from this board are in worse condition!
Capacitor premature failure is the function of temperature, which is the function of current (own heat generation, because of internal resistance = Joule's first law) and surrounding heat emitters, which is the function of AC part in DC. Multiplied by capacitors plague. Multiplied by 5V rail used for power AGP and CPU (remember 35-45A 5V rails on older PSUs ?). Starting from Nforce2 CPU rail input changed to 12V. As of chemical degradation - decades, 40 years at least. So the answer is - no need to resolder any other capacitors, only the high current power path ones.
Yes! my favourite retro platform. She was short lived but I loved it, those early Athlon chips were exciting during that period when they were trading blows with Intel for fastest desktop CPU. I bought in with a slot A Athlon 700 'Argon' and quickly learned how to overclock it with the gold finger device, should have waited for an 800/850 or a Thunderbird full-speed cache version to get to the magical 1GHz early but oh well! Everyone was in a rush in those days.
Nice to see a better cleaning. I clean every board, cpu, heatsink, etc like this, if not a bit more more thorough. With dish soap + water, a soft-bristle toothbrush, then a brush with longer bristles on the tip for all the crevices (two passes). Then a tap water rinse, a second rinse/soak/tapping/shaking in a tub of distilled water (I distill it myself), trying to get all remnants of soap or tap water out from under components, then on top of a fan for at least 12 hours. Forced air (I use a datavac) can help dry the board quicker on the surface, but I still like to use a fan to dry out under all the chips at least overnight, before powering it on. Notable the North or South bridges, and GPU chips, which have very little clearance for moisture evaporation. PCBs just look so nice when they're perfectly clean, and have no mineral deposits due to a distilled water rinse. I'm on the team of replace-all-capacitors, if the board is physically good, and the person has the skills to safely do so. 30 years from now, the new caps today should still work, but the caps from the 90s will likely require more board work, and surely electrolytics will be impossible to find. I plan on still using my boards 30 years from now, so I'd rather replace them now ;) That's actually why I'm also looking for pc parts today - they'll get even more difficult to find in the future. Find what I want now, or over the next few years, so that I have the parts to play with later. Cleaning, replacing Nicad or old caps, and storing them in proper ESD-safe bags, with foam and within boxes will protect them from physical damage, including in the event of a mild earthquake where it could fall from a shelf. Even more than that, my boxes then get put into plastic zip bags, and then put into a gasketed storage tote, and then stacked onto a shelf. If a component lasted this long, and works today, I want to ensure that it is cared for and protected into the future. Preservation!
When I first got back into computers. They sold a motherboard call MachSpeed. I can't remember the exact story but they are the same board (Jetway). With bad caps all over the place. They offered a life time warranty on the motherboard if you registered it. These was P4 boards. The boards they sent back would do the same thing even in sometimes under 1 year. Talk about upset customers.
That's really annoying! I guess at the time when the capacitor plague was in full force, many companies didn't know what was going on for quite some time. Which stock is affected, what models may fail within a year again etc.
As usual, a great movie. In our country (Poland) Athlons on Slot A were not popular. They were quickly replaced by the common Socket 462. For a short time I had a board on an AMD 750 chipset with an Athlon 650Mhz. As for the capacitors, I'm wondering myself.... Since the board works fine it probably doesn't make sense to replace them all. Such a thought... To this day I still have my first sound card on ISA Avance Logic ALS120, which I bought I think in 1996 for my 486, and I don't know whether to replace the capacitors on it or not. The card works, but I can hear noise and strange interference. I don't know if it had that from new or if the old capacitors are actually to blame.
Ah, the AMD 750 - Irongate I believe. I don't remember what chipset I had back then, I just wanted an AMD CPU. I skipped PIII and P4 from Intel. I have an old sound system which has extremely old capacitors. It's very noisy. Some day, I'll replace the capacitors and see if it makes a difference. Just to see what difference it makes and if it's noticeable
@@bitsundbolts I remember Irongate, and regret it, My GA-7IXE4 ... I was still very attached to a number of ISA cards and it 2 slots for them, it was also the peak of the VIA chipset / soundblaster bug, but the lack of 133 (266DDR) FSB support was a pain, as was the AGP2X which some drivers forced back to 1x as the earlier release of the chipset (before working super bypass mode) was buggy. It basically killed my chances of upgrading on that platform
I remember seeing a few Jetway motherboards in the very late 90s and early 2000s. They always just seemed to be a Taiwanese value brand. Not bad per se just no frills boards. Probably why they didn't last very long as they didn't stand out in any meaningful way. The Slot A 700 MHz Athlon was also my first introduction to those chips via a work PC. Mine was running on a AMD 750 chipset motherboard from Gigabyte. The slot1/super socket 7 through socket 478 P4 & early Athlon 64 (and everything in between) were during the capacitor plague years. I saw so many boards die from bulging and leaking capacitors, some after less than a year of use! I also had a few motherboards die spectacularly from bad caps. Like my Abit BH6 where one of the power MOSFETs blew up, probably because a bad cap shorted completely. Left a sizeable burn mark on the board when it died!
So, my scenarios I mention in the video are not that far fetched! Thanks for sharing the story about your board! I don't remember what happened to my Athlon system back then (moving a lot and leaving Germany for good). But I think it had an issue because of a (cheap) power supply failing, probably killing the board and probably the CPU as well.
Jetway was one of two brands that would make my heart sink. The other being PC Chips. So many of friends machines with the same chipset and CPU as me would have problems with those makes. I am sure they have a few good boards, just like all brands have their ups and downs. I skipped the slot era going from Super Socket 7 to Socket A. Now though I'm just glad that one of these boards is saved.
This is so true. Jetway was similar to ASRock in that sometimes you get a gem, many times you get inconsistent results. They were not terrible, but I had far better luck building stable systems around AOpen and Gigabyte.
they used to die like crazy within a short time mostly with dead chipsets. happened to me too i had an athlon 750 or something like that the board lasted only 3 months and just died.
Yes I remember them as being in the PC Chips tier as well! cheap but for a reason. I had a Gigabyte board for Slot A, it seemed fine from memory. I think I remember the critical thing being to get one with an AMD750 chipset (I think!) vs the alternative Via chipset.
Mount Motherboard hits again! Love Need for Speed at the end :) Capacitors... If they work I'd leave them or I'd spend my days recapping. If you're going to use the board more seriously, then maybe you could consider that.Thanks for the video!
Need for Speed Porsche was one of my favorite games back then. I'll probably leave the board as is, leaving the old, but good looking, capacitors in place. And the board does work at the moment. Why take the opportunity away to have it break by itself and me making another video about it 😉
Its the high side caps on vcore that are generally most likely to fail. (The big 16v caps around the cpu socket.) They are subject to the most heat and power supply ripple. Anything from nippon chemicon kzg series i replace on sight regardless of condition. They are notoriously bad. Caps on lower voltage rails and arents kzg i usually leave alone unless theres visible bulging or leakage.
I had an 850 and a golden finger device.... good fun. With my GF2 GTS with all custom heatsinks I made it to third place on Mad Onion for this config. Then figured out only more money will win and dropped the endaevour to stay on top.
@BitundBolts To answer your question: As a rule, I replace caps only under two situations. 1. If they show any signs of damage or leakage. 2. If the board is malfunctioning. Caps are, despite their reputation, very resilient devices. Even lower quality caps, if made properly, should last for 80+ years. As long as they are not overheated or overvolted, they should last a lifetime.
Cap replacement: only replace the bulging/damaged ones and if there are more of the same brand and values that are not bulging/damaged. They are probably from the same batch and will get damaged over time. But if they are not damaged that can be because they are used elsewhere on the board and doesn't get as much stress on them so maybe they are fine (like close to the ISA slots, those look normal compared to the ones around the Slot1 connector).
@@bitsundboltsI'm trying to find a SlotA mainboard for years now. It's a bit hard as these are very uncommon here in Poland, plus people tend to price them very very high. Guess it's like that anywhere. Cheers and a Happy Christmas!
Yes, they are expensive! I did buy a Slot A board in Germany from eBay and it was very expensive. I got it a few months back because I wanted to start making content for this platform as well - that was before I was introduced to the scrapyard. Now I just hope to find more of them there.
I know "Teyah" brand caps from that era are something to watch out for... but with that said, one of my retro PC's has a super socket 7 mobo that's absolutely covered with them and it's holding up fine so far. The eBay auction where I bought the board two years ago claimed it was new old stock, just lacking the original packaging, which probably means in truth that it was lightly used - but the original caps have held fine up so far, whereas the identical mobo I rescued from a scrap PC one year later needed all the Teyah caps replaced.
As someone who ventured in deeper recaps - ABIT BE6-II and BP6, Soyo 6BA+IV, Matsonic MS8308EP, ECS K7VZA, Luckytech P6BX2. Replace all caps except the smaller ones (like very tiny, smaller than the regular RAM/VRM caps.). Especially in your case, GSC is known to fail from just sitting (I had to rid an ASUS K8N of those buggers. Yuck.) and in time, you'll have to replace the small ones. As for Jetway quality - pretty good once you recap it, but very lacklustre than even obscure manufacturers like Luckytech or RedFox. I had a J-7BXAN - it had nearly no ACPI implementation under NT4/2k/XP. Other than that, for a very cheap BX board, it did its job very well.
For cap replacement for capacitor plague era hardware, usually my technique is to replace only the series of caps that have one of them bad Say you have a board with 10x 1000uF 16v caps and 3 1500uF 10v caps. If one or more 1000uF caps is bad and the 1500uF caps are fine, I'll replace all of the 1000uF caps and I'll leave alone the 1500uF caps. It is to avoid the law of series. Often, many different brands of caps are used on boards and some aged better than others. So if one cap in a serie of caps is failing, they're all condemned to me. But the other, different, caps should be fine
Interesting take - and mirrors what other people have said. I like this approach as well. Less stress on the board, but a small risk that a seemingly good capacitor my be bad. So far, I haven't encountered an issue with the approach you mentioned.
@@bitsundbolts yeah, it works well for capacitor plague era boards, however when it comes to older boards from like the late 80s/early 90s, usually with smd caps and there's signs some of the caps leaked, I'll replace all of them because corrosion is usually much more destructive and harder to clean out. Typically found on sega game gear, mega cd, 32x, super Nintendo, Amiga and Macintosh ... I even once had a compaq 386sx that had through hole caps in the PSU that were all leaking. That was a first to me, but yeah, I start to believe there is another capacitor plague from the late 80's/early 90s that reveals itself only now. And this one is much more dangerous for the PCB than the 2000s one
Get a little shop vac that can go in reverse. With the narrow attachment, they create a lot of pressure and work great for drying boards in seconds instead of days. My Shop-Vac brand one is so strong, I'm afraid I'll blow components off the boards, so I keep the attachment at a a variable distance, depending on what I'm aiming at.
@@bitsundbolts Well, the other factor is we have very hard water where I live, so it will leave behind potentially conductive deposits, if I let it sit.
Ahh, yes, that is a problem. I live in the desert and most of our water comes from desalinated water. There is almost nothing in the water and it dries nicely without leaving deposits.
Using air to blow off wet boards might work some of the time but you should still leave time to air dry. Air just doesn't get all the water out from under BGA chips. I used an air compressor to dry my Quadro FX 3000 after washing it and it started showing corruption after a minute or two of use. After some extended time under a hot lamp it started working again.
Great repair! I replace all the capacitors of the affected value/s, including the ones that look/measure OK, but leave those of unaffected values alone even if they're from the same brand/series. Replacing all the capacitors from the same brand/series (or even all the capacitors, depending on the brands involved ) would probably be the better idea, but I fear damaging the board with my lack of skill and crappy soldering iron :-).
I wish there would be a good method for in-circuit measuring capacitors. But from what I know, it is not possible (maybe it is with expensive gear). I tend to also leave unaffected values on the board. I recapped a Gigabyte board which had blown capacitors all over the board. For Slot 1 and Slot A boards, the capacitors around the power delivery next to the CPU are usually the ones that are affected.
@@bitsundbolts ESR meter is what you need, it is very expensive at around 30$ :D ... but it might not work that well if there are lots of capacitors in parallel and some of them are still good. I got my ESR meter back in 2009 when I started electronics repair and I use it almost weekly to this day
I got a cheap ESR meter, but it doesn't work well on this board. It does work well on the individual caps when they are off the board, but then I can also use other methods to test.
@@bitsundbolts Yeah, ESR meters are not useful when the capacitors are in parallel (and maybe in other situations I don't know). I have also replaced bulging capacitors that measure OK in ESR but not in capacitance :-/.
When I re-cap stuff it depends a bit on the purpose of the device how far I go, as a minimum I always change the same type capacitors as failing ones as if one swell upp the other same caps will soon too. The capacitor plague is a devil in disguise for sure as you don´t really know which caps have the faulty electrolyte formula, you can generally trust Japanese caps especially Rubycon, Nippon chemicon, Panasonic, Nichicon etc. but to be honest I actually more and more often see caps from the 90s from brands like Nichicon start to leak the electrolyte trough the rubber seal now, These don´t swell and is a silent killer as they don´t really lose capacitance that much and not very "vissible" either like the Vulcanic leaks you get on the cheap caps as they just start becoming a little moist at the bottom at first which you don´t really see before it soaks the whole board in corrosive goop. bad caps is the big killer of all things you love so my rule is that IF the device is in my dedicated usage and need re-cap somewhere I take the extra step and recap EVERYTHING on the board, including Power supplies, I have a 486 computer that almost went extinct because all caps have started to leak and corrode the whole unique IBM power supply to death, it was actually completely dead when I found out what happen but I managed to save it just in time with a complete re-cap of the motherboard and Powersupply. And even my expensive Nixdorf P1 computer from Leaky Nichicon had a complete re-cap with a hair of margin before permanent damage, puh, I have no trust for old caps, they must not be trusted!
Nice find and restoration job! I did not own one of these as I wasn't a particular fan of the cooling solutions for slot-based CPUs. So after Slot 1, I went (from a PII 400) to Socket A instead, which turned out to be the right choice I suppose. But the Slot A variants were great CPUs nonetheless and are probably more rare and valuable than the respective Socket A counterparts now. Was this the same scrapyard that you previously visited? If so, it must've still been inside a case to have survived in such good condition! 😅 I like to blow cleaned boards dry with high pressure air from a compressor to make sure that no moisture is trapped under any of the components, but I suppose the hot Dubai sun takes care of that just as well (and much quieter, too). I would recommend a final rinse with deionized/distilled water in that case though. As for cap replacement, I usually take a nuanced approach, focusing on groups/brands/types that were clearly stressed/are more important/from which one or more has gone bad. Unless it's some particularly high value item with which I don't want to take any chances, then I go all the way. I really like your cap test setup with the LED, it's a great additional tool for diagnosis, as the tester really doesn't tell you the whole story sometimes. I've had caps that looked and measured perfectly fine, yet clearly were the culprit.
Yes, it is the same scrapyard. My Sunday morning routine from now on. I may even start livestreams next year because I have too much to work on and sometimes not enough time to make those "polished" videos. Regarding the moisture - I wish I could get a small compressor, but I'm running out of space in my apartment 😔. Your approach is the best one to get any water residue out from under chips and sockets. And yes, the little circuit tells a bit more than just numbers. I guess the meters can be fooled if a capacitor is screwed up in a balanced way 🤣
You are likely to get a reliable repair if you chase down and replace all Ultra low esr capacitors. Other capacitors typically don't require replacement, but often I'll just do the "replace anything 470uF and above" just for a nice finish. And sometimes, there will be more capacitors that show signs of failure, many old capacitors were just that poorly made ... it really is a board by board thing. Anyway, you lucked out on the Athlon board. On mine, I had to replace ALL of the physical PCI slots as for some reason the originals stopped working. That was a not fun thing.
Wow, I don't want to replace any type of slots (including memory). Sounds like a terribly tedious job! What tools did you use to desolder so many pins?
Hopefully the memory subsystem is designed better than that of my Jetway 994AN-L. I have only had it working close to the performance of my Abit VP6 once. Typically memory bandwidth with PC133 is slower than PC66 on my KT133 and 440BX (sub 300MB/sec in all tests) and game performance on any card is crippled. I'd recommend replacing all capacitors related to CPU, memory and videocard power delivery - pretty much any that would have been exposed to a lot of heat, something that would have significantly contributed to the capacitor failures on my Duron 1000's original board. Its cooler is only 40mm x 40mm x ~55mm and post board repair sees the CPU reporting ~60 degrees Celsius idle after running for half an hour. The 994AN-L is even worse, as the FDD connector is between the AGP and first PCI slot - no AMR connector to space it out at least slightly.
You may be right. Maybe it was also to just remove the old thermal interface. Surprisingly, the surface was totally smooth. If you look at the backplate of the CPU, you will also see some discoloration. Might have been some residue left that attached this surface too.
The problem where I live is that the new replacement capacitors sold here are worse than the ones on the board (the not bulging ones) so there is a big chance that even with replaced capacitors the board would not boot. So replacing the good capacitors is out of the question.
Very valid assessment! And you know, why trying to fix a working system. If spare parts are scarce, it is viable to leave it in its current working state. Those boards won't see a lot of action anymore.
Hi! my point is: all the capacitors have the same age, if one or more of them have problems, we should expect problems in a short term of the others that looks good. S, my opinion is replace all
I usually replace the same model / same area caps where issues appear. But usually you'll find different values and brands on the board. But yes, if you want to be on the safe side, then you can replace them all. It will just be a lot of work, but piece of mind. And better to replace groups of capacitors and not all at once - just in case something goes wrong you don't have to worry about the whole board.
Hello, I have an Abit KG7-RAID with an Athlon 1400 MHz Thunderbird CPU. Most of the larger capacitors have failed and I don't think I can restart it. I would have to either replace them myself or ship it to a repairman. Also, the Enermax 350 watt PSU probably also needs repairing. Why did they make such cheap undependable capacitors back then? {SIGH}
I kind of think that if you have bulging caps, then there is a reason why. If it's environmental then it's only a matter of time before the rest go too. So I think it's a good idea to do all of them in this case. Also anything from the 90's or 00's should be recapped if it has SMD caps. They were trash caps back then.
Not really, the capacitors around the CPU are typically of a higher electrical specification than the others scattered on the board. This higher electrical specification often came at the expense of the lifespan of these capacitors. And this area tends to get much hotter than other areas of the board. So often you will find these boards have perfectly serviceable caps alongside others that have gone byebye!
I have the footage of replacing at least some of the caps, but somehow, the video got too long. The footage isn't that good because the boards are quite big and I need to work on both sides of the board. So, a lot of the footage isn't sharp. But I'll keep it in mind for the next recapping.
From what he's shown it's the GSC branded caps which were like the top leader of the capacitor plague. I had an ePox motherboard on which basically all of them bulged and leaked over just a few years.
congratulate with find ! will there be benchmarks ? like always, amd-boards have bulged capacitors, as if they were cursed))) i think, this related with using bad psu or psu with basic (powerful) +12 V line, & mb they had voltage ripplies on +5 V line => caps were bulging. better replace them all, is unknown, how long they`ll work. slot a wery rare, at least in russia & cic
Yes, there will be more content for AMD Slot A (and Socket A later) as well. I noticed yesterday that I do have a Athlon 700 Thunderbird (256 KB L2 cache) as well. The one in the video is Pluto (512 KB L2 cache). I'm curious myself to see how AMD is supposed to be 20% faster in games compared to Intel at the same frequency. I just need to find a Pentium III with a similar frequency.
If you love the thing you will replace all the caps, but if you are practical you will only replace the bad ones. It also depends on use, like if you only use it once a year replace only the bad, but if it's high use you do all, ie, no point spending $100 on caps when it's occasional use and there is no history of those caps leaking goo.
I worked in a PC shop when these were new. Jetway were just a cheap brand. VIA chipsets were terrible at the time. All sorts of crashes and bluescreens, every update of the inf driver improved the stability, and they ended up pretty good by the time they became obsolete.
Haha, yeah, that is what I remember from VIA. That is why I liked the nForce/2 chipset so much. They were solid and had good drivers as far as I remember. I loved my Athlon XP Barton 3200+ - I still have that PC and all it's components.
I prefer to use car shampoo rather than dish soap. I'm sure it makes no real difference but there are salts in dish soap whereas car shampoo is more designed with metals in mind. If rinsed well, it shouldn't matter, but it just makes me feel better.
I skipped slot A. I jumped from super 7 to the AMD thunderbird (Socket A) That was one of my favorite computers. The next favorite was 2008 intel core 2 quad with nvidia nforce. And my next favorite is my 2021 build which is AMD Ryzen 5900x. The computers I didn't like as much are too many to count, but notable ones include an AMD Athlon XP mobile processor. My cousin gave it and the motherboard to me. I have no idea where he got it from. It was supposed to be a 64 bit generation, but it didn't have 64 bit support on it. Maybe it's because it was mobile. To this day I don't understand how and why that board and CPU existed. lol It was peculiar for sure. The other notable one was my Intel I7-2600. The CPU was amazing, but the motherboard was inferior to the nforce board in my opinion. As a result the core 2 quad wins. I'm still sad that nvidia boards aren't a thing because they were amazing, but my ryzen board is so rock solid.
Slot A had very short life anyway. In 7-8 months AMD switched to the Socket A, which turned out to be much more superior platform, lasting 3 years. 4 if you count lower end sempron cpus released alongside athlon64.
Had most of the customer platforms from the 90s/early 2000s (Socket 3, 4, 5, 7, Super7, A, 370, Slot 1) over the years but never had a Slot A platform. Feels like I missed something.^^ That placement of the floppy and IDE headers is the worst I have ever seen on a mainboard. What were they thinking? That it is 1999 and nobody is buying AGP graphics cards? As long as capacitors are not bloated I don´t replace them. Have several Amiga 500, 1000, 2000 and 3000 here that are still on their original 1990s caps and run stable for hours. Only if the system is not running stable for no apparent reason it is maybe a good idea to replace them all (or at least the ones delivering power to the CPU and memory slots). By looking at their position on the mainboard you can guess what part of the board they are powering.
Yeah, the floppy and IDE connectors seem to have been an afterthought. I tend to leave the board in its current condition. The capacitors that did not have the bulging top tested fine in my circuit (also mhA draw), I believe the remaining caps to be ok. Also, the sound quality coming from the board is ok - so, I think those smaller caps are fine too.
@@bitsundbolts That bulging comes not from decomposing electrolyte (like you said in the video), it comes from an short in the capacitor that creates heat and makes the electrolyte boil. It then turns into steam and increases the pressure inside making the cover bulging. Next step would have been opening of the cap to vent steam. Some of the caps from the older video have already partially opened and you can see the dried electrolyte on the top of the caps. That was the harmless end of life for this caps, it also can happen that they simply explode, the metal part is flying through your computer and electrolyte is landing everywhere close to the cap with parts of the insulation material sticking to it. That dries and you are in a world of pain trying to clean the PCB from the sticky and smelly leftovers. ^^ While testing the caps the LED became dark as soon as the bulged cap was inserted, so it shorted the circuit and no power was flowing through the LED anymore. Typical old caps dry out due to evaporation through the sealing (that is not tragic, they simply not reach the mA ratings printed on them), or they start to leak electrolyte through the bottom sealing leaving puddles of electrolyte next to them. That is bad, because the electrolyte is damaging the traces. That is a common problem with the younger Amigas that use SMD-components (600, 1200, 4000, CD32). If not treated for years leaking electrolyte becomes as worse as leaking batteries, it destroy the traces below them.
I have seen some badly leaking capacitors. The sooner you get the electrolyte off the PCB, the better. I would like to add to your explanation of electrolyte evaporation, that I've read somewhere that a chemical process occurs when electrons attach to the rolled-up metal membrane inside capacitors (sorry for probably using wrong terms here). This chemical reaction is the one that causes this thin metal sheet to degrade over time and turn a small amount of electrolyte into gas. It is a very slow process, but it occurs each time a capacitor is charged.
Your memory doesn't betray you. VIA drivers were a bit of a firecracker in the past, very temperamental. The lack of a good DLL version control in Win9x didn't helped.
Not only did it use the Alpha EV100 bus, rumor has it that its FPU was essentially an x86 reverse engineering of the Alpha AXP floating point unit giving it a massive advantage over the Pentium PRO FPU of the Pentium II and III class Intel CPUs. Infact im fairly sure the modern Ryzen CPU use a highly modernised version of the same APU in its "bones" But this is educated speculation, I build PCs, I dont design CPUs but I do have a basic understanding of architecture. lol I have a K7 "Athlon Classic" 700MHz version in one of my "Retroboxes", mated to a 3DFx Banshee. running 98SE, I had to build it because back when the K7 was new I wanted one so bad but couldnt hope to afford one at the time. (And yes I am an "AMD Fanboy") Unfortunately it stopped working, and I suspect it died from bad capacitors, so yeah id suggest replacing yours.
AMD did acquire talent from DEC and NexGen to work on the K7 project. DEC was sold to Compaq in 1998 and the Alpha processor development was discontinued due to that. So yes, what you're saying makes a lot of sense!
Found a ATI 9800SE 128 mb today in the junkyard that would have suited this rig pretty well I'd imagine gonna test it later this week or tonight maybe if i get the energy after work to dig out a agp motherboard with a pentium 4 in it. It's a generic oem version which probably will unlock the 8 pipelines if it works & has 128 mb ram in an L shape on both sides of the gpu, gpu cooler is not diamond shaped but square. *update, card is dead.* Scrambled stuff on the display on both dvi & vga oh well.. 9550 will remain the best agp card i got for now then, also socket 775 agp motherboard is complaining about usb overcurrent protection even though nothing is plugged into usb*
Ah, sad that the card is dead. I wonder if it's memory related - which could be fixed by replacing it. I do have a few Radeon 9xxx cards as well. None of them are tested yet.
Replace all caps, they will just fail eventually. Caps from the late 80 and 90 were all manufactured from defective electrolyte. Also Would like to see how you replace the capacitors. What issues did you have.
With this board, I have no issues replacing the capacitors. I turn the board around, apply some flux on the soldered pins and alternate between them with the soldering iron. While holding the capacitor on the other side of the board, I move them back and forth, slowly taking each of them off the board.
I have one Slot A machine with AMD Irongate northbridge 😅 It's AGP-port is the most problematic I have ever used... Nvidias are out of luck even at AGP 1x mode but ATI and Voodoo3 works much better. Mobo is MSI MS-6167.
I have another Slot A motherboard, but I don't know which one and what chipset. But I did notice that I have an AMD Athlon 700 Thunderbird too! Face-off coming soon: Pluto vs Thunderbird and hopefully on two different motherboards!
@@bitsundbolts One thing I have learned is that the first Slot A-mobos doesnt officially support Thunderbirds so there can be random hangs here and there.
Interesting. I'll keep that in mind. I actually didn't know that there were two versions of the "same" CPU. But yesterday I looked inside both Slot A CPUs from the contacts side. The packaging is identical, but it's very visible that the Thunderbirds have the cache chips missing.
It's just that this is a lot of work. But you are right, they will all eventually fail. For a retro machine, it may be ok to keep them for now since there is little usage. You may be able to replace electrolytic capacitors with solid capacitors. I did this on a P4B motherboard from ASUS. Works well so far.
I don't think the slot was turned 180 degrees for amd. I am pretty sure I have a couple intel slot mobo's here somewhere that have the slot oriented the same way as this athlon board.
It was indeed rotated. Slot A CPUs fit in Slot 1 when flipped, but the placement of the CPU + heatsink wouldn't fit as the heatsink would hit the back of the case, potentially capacitors, and the rear i/o ports.
I actually tried exactly that! A Pentium II/III fits in Slot A, and an Athlon fits into Slot 1 - you just need to turn the CPU 180 degrees for the other platform. Of course, NEVER do that! AMD CPUs won't work on Intel platform and vice versa from this generation onwards. And yes, if you try with a cooler, it won't fit - either it's the I/O connectors or capacitors that are in the way.
@@masejoer Oh I get it now, the board that the cpu is on and the slot are flipped, but the cpu and heatsink still stick out the same side so it appears to be the same. Now that I think about it, I don't think I ever tried my amd slot cpu's in any other boards, lol.
Jetway is certainly... a manufacturer. Boards of that era were not considered reliable or nicely built. They did make some a lot more reasonable ones later on, but they also quit the mainstream market but kept on making ITX and specialised boards, if memory serves. Some early Jetway boards suspiciously match Lucky Star or Formoza, not sure how and if the companies are connected, and i'm yet to see a product from these two that wasn't garbage. My logic when doing recaps is to lift a cap in each group of similar ones in same or similar circuits. If a certain value or group is bad, they're all getting the pull. If they still look unquestionably good on an LCR, i can put them back in if they aren't too critical. The CPU VRM ones are what i'd call critical, they aren't going back in, plus well just depends on the topology of the board what looks like it's critical or not. The little ones around the soundchip don't need to be pulled at all if it's not making audible trouble, they should be fine forever. I don't think the remaining caps are too important, i wouldn't be inclined to pull them now if they don't feel like they're getting at all warm. If there's external or internal heat on any of them, do consider a replacement. Dish soap wash is fundamentally a valid method, but i'm never quite sure about moisture stuck under BGA chips. You're "supposed" to use distilled water (pointless IMO when dealing with a badly contaminated board to begin with) and then bake it out in a drying oven, but i don't happen to have a suitable oven! When i did do the soap wash once or twice over the years, i dry the PCB for upwards of a week just in case, which makes me a little distrustful of the method, because leaving water in for too long is something i'd rather avoid. Why a week? Because i made an experience once 20 years ago that 24h wasn't nearly enough. Maybe if i lived in a desert, or indeed in an oven, i'd be of a different mind. Alcohol and residue-free brake cleaner are cheap enough that i usually just use them.
Yeah, if I didn't have the hot climate here, I would not trust 24 hours. Water is quite resilient in small gaps and below chips. It has to evaporate properly. The water we have here in Dubai is desalinated seawater - and it leaves almost no residue on surfaces. So far, it's good enough and I haven't had any trouble using it.
Another theory for the Slot format was that Intel realized the i686 architecture greatly benefits from cache. On the PPro they had the cache on-die, with the result that if something was wrong with the cache the whole CPU package was wasted. With the cache close, but on separate chips they could increase production yield since they could be tested and swapped individually.
Yes, that is correct. The PPro had actually two separate dies if I'm not mistaken. That is why the CPU is so big - but they could only be tested together in the ceramic housing. If one of the chips was faulty, you had to trash the entire thing.
When recapping a board, I'd suggest replacing as needed instead of replacing everything. Just because a capacitor is old doesn't mean that it's failing too. Of course, it does make sense to replace all of one specific type of capacitor. It's very likely that if one of the same type, brand and value have failed, then the rest on the board would be on their way out too. It's safe to assume they very likely came from the same batch during manufacturing.
I get it, it's a valid argument but the problem with that is capacitors don't always bulge or show other obvious signs when they're failing and you can't test them properly in circuit so if you've any suspicion they may be bad you have to remove them. Unfortunately, no matter how good you are with a soldering iron/desoldering tool etc. removing them from the board can damage them, by overheating them and or mechanical forces. So, when you've gone to the trouble of removing a capacitor that costs pennies to test it properly it's better to replace it to save damaging a rare board, CPU etc. or causing yourself more work in the near future.
9:05 that is a not good button battery test :) Youl should get a proper battery tester for that purpouse. When You check open ciruit voltage with a multimeter and get like 2.8V that voltage can be really a lot lower with just some more current drain from it than the multimeter takes :)
Most of the batteries I take out from those boards show 0V. So, I was surprised to see anything above 2 volts. But I get your point. It may be 2.8 volts, but nothing that can be sustainable. The moment any load is placed on the battery, voltage goes down significantly.
My quick test is to press down on both sides of the battery with my fingers. If skin resistance doesn't cause a measurable drop the battery is probably good enough to run an RTC, at least for the short term.
To replace all or not to replace all... it is always a sticky question of risk balance.
I'm usually in the "replace what must be replaced and maybe the rest from the same brand of capacitor if you replaced a few of them already" camp. There is always a risk of damaging the board and components when removing any component so if you stick to replacing what you have to, you might reduce the risk of unnecessary damage.
That said, boards from that era generally were a question of "when", not "if" the capacitors fail and once I determined the board was functional as you have, I'd carefully consider proactively replacing whatever else I could find on the board that might need it.
Sounds very reasonable and probably what I'm going to do as well. The caps that look good also performed well. What worries me a bit is that the caps from this board looked way better than the ones from the P4B, but I feel the ones from this board are in worse condition!
Capacitor premature failure is the function of temperature, which is the function of current (own heat generation, because of internal resistance = Joule's first law) and surrounding heat emitters, which is the function of AC part in DC. Multiplied by capacitors plague. Multiplied by 5V rail used for power AGP and CPU (remember 35-45A 5V rails on older PSUs ?). Starting from Nforce2 CPU rail input changed to 12V.
As of chemical degradation - decades, 40 years at least. So the answer is - no need to resolder any other capacitors, only the high current power path ones.
Yes! my favourite retro platform. She was short lived but I loved it, those early Athlon chips were exciting during that period when they were trading blows with Intel for fastest desktop CPU.
I bought in with a slot A Athlon 700 'Argon' and quickly learned how to overclock it with the gold finger device, should have waited for an 800/850 or a Thunderbird full-speed cache version to get to the magical 1GHz early but oh well! Everyone was in a rush in those days.
Definitely a cool little device to have
Nice to see a better cleaning. I clean every board, cpu, heatsink, etc like this, if not a bit more more thorough. With dish soap + water, a soft-bristle toothbrush, then a brush with longer bristles on the tip for all the crevices (two passes). Then a tap water rinse, a second rinse/soak/tapping/shaking in a tub of distilled water (I distill it myself), trying to get all remnants of soap or tap water out from under components, then on top of a fan for at least 12 hours. Forced air (I use a datavac) can help dry the board quicker on the surface, but I still like to use a fan to dry out under all the chips at least overnight, before powering it on. Notable the North or South bridges, and GPU chips, which have very little clearance for moisture evaporation.
PCBs just look so nice when they're perfectly clean, and have no mineral deposits due to a distilled water rinse.
I'm on the team of replace-all-capacitors, if the board is physically good, and the person has the skills to safely do so. 30 years from now, the new caps today should still work, but the caps from the 90s will likely require more board work, and surely electrolytics will be impossible to find. I plan on still using my boards 30 years from now, so I'd rather replace them now ;) That's actually why I'm also looking for pc parts today - they'll get even more difficult to find in the future. Find what I want now, or over the next few years, so that I have the parts to play with later.
Cleaning, replacing Nicad or old caps, and storing them in proper ESD-safe bags, with foam and within boxes will protect them from physical damage, including in the event of a mild earthquake where it could fall from a shelf. Even more than that, my boxes then get put into plastic zip bags, and then put into a gasketed storage tote, and then stacked onto a shelf. If a component lasted this long, and works today, I want to ensure that it is cared for and protected into the future. Preservation!
Great to hear that you put so much dedication towards preserving old components from 30 years ago. I'll try to save whatever I find.
1998-2002 is probably the best time to be alive
When I first got back into computers. They sold a motherboard call MachSpeed. I can't remember the exact story but they are the same board (Jetway). With bad caps all over the place. They offered a life time warranty on the motherboard if you registered it. These was P4 boards. The boards they sent back would do the same thing even in sometimes under 1 year. Talk about upset customers.
That's really annoying! I guess at the time when the capacitor plague was in full force, many companies didn't know what was going on for quite some time. Which stock is affected, what models may fail within a year again etc.
Wow, Athlon in SlotA pkg, Thing of beauty, joy forever.
You brought back memories with NFS-PU. I had a K6-3 400 @450, VIA MVP3, with 192MB ram & GF2MX
Happy to hear that the video brought back some memories! The K6-III was a nice CPU. I have that CPU in my collection as well.
If you DO replace them all, it would be a useful video for anyone else doing a similar vintage motherboard restoration.
Porsche Unleashed - my favorite NFS
As usual, a great movie. In our country (Poland) Athlons on Slot A were not popular. They were quickly replaced by the common Socket 462. For a short time I had a board on an AMD 750 chipset with an Athlon 650Mhz.
As for the capacitors, I'm wondering myself.... Since the board works fine it probably doesn't make sense to replace them all.
Such a thought...
To this day I still have my first sound card on ISA Avance Logic ALS120, which I bought I think in 1996 for my 486, and I don't know whether to replace the capacitors on it or not. The card works, but I can hear noise and strange interference. I don't know if it had that from new or if the old capacitors are actually to blame.
Ah, the AMD 750 - Irongate I believe. I don't remember what chipset I had back then, I just wanted an AMD CPU. I skipped PIII and P4 from Intel.
I have an old sound system which has extremely old capacitors. It's very noisy. Some day, I'll replace the capacitors and see if it makes a difference. Just to see what difference it makes and if it's noticeable
@@bitsundbolts I remember Irongate, and regret it, My GA-7IXE4 ... I was still very attached to a number of ISA cards and it 2 slots for them, it was also the peak of the VIA chipset / soundblaster bug, but the lack of 133 (266DDR) FSB support was a pain, as was the AGP2X which some drivers forced back to 1x as the earlier release of the chipset (before working super bypass mode) was buggy. It basically killed my chances of upgrading on that platform
I remember seeing a few Jetway motherboards in the very late 90s and early 2000s. They always just seemed to be a Taiwanese value brand. Not bad per se just no frills boards. Probably why they didn't last very long as they didn't stand out in any meaningful way. The Slot A 700 MHz Athlon was also my first introduction to those chips via a work PC. Mine was running on a AMD 750 chipset motherboard from Gigabyte.
The slot1/super socket 7 through socket 478 P4 & early Athlon 64 (and everything in between) were during the capacitor plague years. I saw so many boards die from bulging and leaking capacitors, some after less than a year of use! I also had a few motherboards die spectacularly from bad caps. Like my Abit BH6 where one of the power MOSFETs blew up, probably because a bad cap shorted completely. Left a sizeable burn mark on the board when it died!
So, my scenarios I mention in the video are not that far fetched! Thanks for sharing the story about your board! I don't remember what happened to my Athlon system back then (moving a lot and leaving Germany for good). But I think it had an issue because of a (cheap) power supply failing, probably killing the board and probably the CPU as well.
Jetway was one of two brands that would make my heart sink. The other being PC Chips. So many of friends machines with the same chipset and CPU as me would have problems with those makes. I am sure they have a few good boards, just like all brands have their ups and downs. I skipped the slot era going from Super Socket 7 to Socket A. Now though I'm just glad that one of these boards is saved.
This is so true. Jetway was similar to ASRock in that sometimes you get a gem, many times you get inconsistent results.
They were not terrible, but I had far better luck building stable systems around AOpen and Gigabyte.
they used to die like crazy within a short time mostly with dead chipsets. happened to me too i had an athlon 750 or something like that the board lasted only 3 months and just died.
So, I guess mine is a lucky survivor!
Yes I remember them as being in the PC Chips tier as well! cheap but for a reason.
I had a Gigabyte board for Slot A, it seemed fine from memory. I think I remember the critical thing being to get one with an AMD750 chipset (I think!) vs the alternative Via chipset.
Mount Motherboard hits again! Love Need for Speed at the end :) Capacitors... If they work I'd leave them or I'd spend my days recapping. If you're going to use the board more seriously, then maybe you could consider that.Thanks for the video!
Need for Speed Porsche was one of my favorite games back then. I'll probably leave the board as is, leaving the old, but good looking, capacitors in place. And the board does work at the moment. Why take the opportunity away to have it break by itself and me making another video about it 😉
Its the high side caps on vcore that are generally most likely to fail. (The big 16v caps around the cpu socket.) They are subject to the most heat and power supply ripple.
Anything from nippon chemicon kzg series i replace on sight regardless of condition. They are notoriously bad.
Caps on lower voltage rails and arents kzg i usually leave alone unless theres visible bulging or leakage.
I had an 850 and a golden finger device.... good fun. With my GF2 GTS with all custom heatsinks I made it to third place on Mad Onion for this config. Then figured out only more money will win and dropped the endaevour to stay on top.
@BitundBolts
To answer your question: As a rule, I replace caps only under two situations. 1. If they show any signs of damage or leakage. 2. If the board is malfunctioning. Caps are, despite their reputation, very resilient devices. Even lower quality caps, if made properly, should last for 80+ years. As long as they are not overheated or overvolted, they should last a lifetime.
Cap replacement: only replace the bulging/damaged ones and if there are more of the same brand and values that are not bulging/damaged. They are probably from the same batch and will get damaged over time. But if they are not damaged that can be because they are used elsewhere on the board and doesn't get as much stress on them so maybe they are fine (like close to the ISA slots, those look normal compared to the ones around the Slot1 connector).
Athlon 650 MHz on a cheap EPOX PRONIX mobo was a helluva upgrade from my K6-2 350 Mhz. Good ol' days
Slot A. Nice find. Very Nice.
I think so too! Thanks
@@bitsundboltsI'm trying to find a SlotA mainboard for years now. It's a bit hard as these are very uncommon here in Poland, plus people tend to price them very very high. Guess it's like that anywhere. Cheers and a Happy Christmas!
Yes, they are expensive! I did buy a Slot A board in Germany from eBay and it was very expensive. I got it a few months back because I wanted to start making content for this platform as well - that was before I was introduced to the scrapyard. Now I just hope to find more of them there.
I know "Teyah" brand caps from that era are something to watch out for... but with that said, one of my retro PC's has a super socket 7 mobo that's absolutely covered with them and it's holding up fine so far. The eBay auction where I bought the board two years ago claimed it was new old stock, just lacking the original packaging, which probably means in truth that it was lightly used - but the original caps have held fine up so far, whereas the identical mobo I rescued from a scrap PC one year later needed all the Teyah caps replaced.
On this board, none of the Teyah branded caps seems to have an issue. It may also depend on the series! But I'll make sure to keep an eye on them.
As someone who ventured in deeper recaps - ABIT BE6-II and BP6, Soyo 6BA+IV, Matsonic MS8308EP, ECS K7VZA, Luckytech P6BX2.
Replace all caps except the smaller ones (like very tiny, smaller than the regular RAM/VRM caps.). Especially in your case, GSC is known to fail from just sitting (I had to rid an ASUS K8N of those buggers. Yuck.) and in time, you'll have to replace the small ones.
As for Jetway quality - pretty good once you recap it, but very lacklustre than even obscure manufacturers like Luckytech or RedFox. I had a J-7BXAN - it had nearly no ACPI implementation under NT4/2k/XP. Other than that, for a very cheap BX board, it did its job very well.
For cap replacement for capacitor plague era hardware, usually my technique is to replace only the series of caps that have one of them bad
Say you have a board with 10x 1000uF 16v caps and 3 1500uF 10v caps.
If one or more 1000uF caps is bad and the 1500uF caps are fine, I'll replace all of the 1000uF caps and I'll leave alone the 1500uF caps. It is to avoid the law of series.
Often, many different brands of caps are used on boards and some aged better than others. So if one cap in a serie of caps is failing, they're all condemned to me. But the other, different, caps should be fine
Interesting take - and mirrors what other people have said. I like this approach as well. Less stress on the board, but a small risk that a seemingly good capacitor my be bad. So far, I haven't encountered an issue with the approach you mentioned.
@@bitsundbolts yeah, it works well for capacitor plague era boards, however when it comes to older boards from like the late 80s/early 90s, usually with smd caps and there's signs some of the caps leaked, I'll replace all of them because corrosion is usually much more destructive and harder to clean out.
Typically found on sega game gear, mega cd, 32x, super Nintendo, Amiga and Macintosh ...
I even once had a compaq 386sx that had through hole caps in the PSU that were all leaking. That was a first to me, but yeah, I start to believe there is another capacitor plague from the late 80's/early 90s that reveals itself only now.
And this one is much more dangerous for the PCB than the 2000s one
thank you
Get a little shop vac that can go in reverse. With the narrow attachment, they create a lot of pressure and work great for drying boards in seconds instead of days. My Shop-Vac brand one is so strong, I'm afraid I'll blow components off the boards, so I keep the attachment at a a variable distance, depending on what I'm aiming at.
If you're in a hurry, that may be a good option. I usually wash boards way before I start working on them.
@@bitsundbolts Well, the other factor is we have very hard water where I live, so it will leave behind potentially conductive deposits, if I let it sit.
Ahh, yes, that is a problem. I live in the desert and most of our water comes from desalinated water. There is almost nothing in the water and it dries nicely without leaving deposits.
Using air to blow off wet boards might work some of the time but you should still leave time to air dry. Air just doesn't get all the water out from under BGA chips. I used an air compressor to dry my Quadro FX 3000 after washing it and it started showing corruption after a minute or two of use. After some extended time under a hot lamp it started working again.
Great repair!
I replace all the capacitors of the affected value/s, including the ones that look/measure OK, but leave those of unaffected values alone even if they're from the same brand/series.
Replacing all the capacitors from the same brand/series (or even all the capacitors, depending on the brands involved ) would probably be the better idea, but I fear damaging the board with my lack of skill and crappy soldering iron :-).
I wish there would be a good method for in-circuit measuring capacitors. But from what I know, it is not possible (maybe it is with expensive gear). I tend to also leave unaffected values on the board. I recapped a Gigabyte board which had blown capacitors all over the board. For Slot 1 and Slot A boards, the capacitors around the power delivery next to the CPU are usually the ones that are affected.
@@bitsundbolts ESR meter is what you need, it is very expensive at around 30$ :D ... but it might not work that well if there are lots of capacitors in parallel and some of them are still good. I got my ESR meter back in 2009 when I started electronics repair and I use it almost weekly to this day
I got a cheap ESR meter, but it doesn't work well on this board. It does work well on the individual caps when they are off the board, but then I can also use other methods to test.
@@bitsundbolts Yeah, ESR meters are not useful when the capacitors are in parallel (and maybe in other situations I don't know). I have also replaced bulging capacitors that measure OK in ESR but not in capacitance :-/.
I start to rely more on my little test circuit with the LED! Those other measurements with meters may throw you off.
When I re-cap stuff it depends a bit on the purpose of the device how far I go, as a minimum I always change the same type capacitors as failing ones as if one swell upp the other same caps will soon too. The capacitor plague is a devil in disguise for sure as you don´t really know which caps have the faulty electrolyte formula, you can generally trust Japanese caps especially Rubycon, Nippon chemicon, Panasonic, Nichicon etc. but to be honest I actually more and more often see caps from the 90s from brands like Nichicon start to leak the electrolyte trough the rubber seal now, These don´t swell and is a silent killer as they don´t really lose capacitance that much and not very "vissible" either like the Vulcanic leaks you get on the cheap caps as they just start becoming a little moist at the bottom at first which you don´t really see before it soaks the whole board in corrosive goop. bad caps is the big killer of all things you love so my rule is that IF the device is in my dedicated usage and need re-cap somewhere I take the extra step and recap EVERYTHING on the board, including Power supplies, I have a 486 computer that almost went extinct because all caps have started to leak and corrode the whole unique IBM power supply to death, it was actually completely dead when I found out what happen but I managed to save it just in time with a complete re-cap of the motherboard and Powersupply. And even my expensive Nixdorf P1 computer from Leaky Nichicon had a complete re-cap with a hair of margin before permanent damage, puh, I have no trust for old caps, they must not be trusted!
Check for sideband adressing capable boards
Nice find and restoration job! I did not own one of these as I wasn't a particular fan of the cooling solutions for slot-based CPUs. So after Slot 1, I went (from a PII 400) to Socket A instead, which turned out to be the right choice I suppose. But the Slot A variants were great CPUs nonetheless and are probably more rare and valuable than the respective Socket A counterparts now. Was this the same scrapyard that you previously visited? If so, it must've still been inside a case to have survived in such good condition! 😅
I like to blow cleaned boards dry with high pressure air from a compressor to make sure that no moisture is trapped under any of the components, but I suppose the hot Dubai sun takes care of that just as well (and much quieter, too). I would recommend a final rinse with deionized/distilled water in that case though. As for cap replacement, I usually take a nuanced approach, focusing on groups/brands/types that were clearly stressed/are more important/from which one or more has gone bad. Unless it's some particularly high value item with which I don't want to take any chances, then I go all the way.
I really like your cap test setup with the LED, it's a great additional tool for diagnosis, as the tester really doesn't tell you the whole story sometimes. I've had caps that looked and measured perfectly fine, yet clearly were the culprit.
Yes, it is the same scrapyard. My Sunday morning routine from now on. I may even start livestreams next year because I have too much to work on and sometimes not enough time to make those "polished" videos.
Regarding the moisture - I wish I could get a small compressor, but I'm running out of space in my apartment 😔. Your approach is the best one to get any water residue out from under chips and sockets.
And yes, the little circuit tells a bit more than just numbers. I guess the meters can be fooled if a capacitor is screwed up in a balanced way 🤣
You are likely to get a reliable repair if you chase down and replace all Ultra low esr capacitors. Other capacitors typically don't require replacement, but often I'll just do the "replace anything 470uF and above" just for a nice finish.
And sometimes, there will be more capacitors that show signs of failure, many old capacitors were just that poorly made ... it really is a board by board thing.
Anyway, you lucked out on the Athlon board. On mine, I had to replace ALL of the physical PCI slots as for some reason the originals stopped working. That was a not fun thing.
Wow, I don't want to replace any type of slots (including memory). Sounds like a terribly tedious job! What tools did you use to desolder so many pins?
@@bitsundbolts That required a desoldering station. Just a cheapy one, but lots of patience too.
I know there will come the day when I have to buy one of those too.
Thanks For Content Becuase I Enjoyng This Video
Thank you!
Hopefully the memory subsystem is designed better than that of my Jetway 994AN-L. I have only had it working close to the performance of my Abit VP6 once.
Typically memory bandwidth with PC133 is slower than PC66 on my KT133 and 440BX (sub 300MB/sec in all tests) and game performance on any card is crippled.
I'd recommend replacing all capacitors related to CPU, memory and videocard power delivery - pretty much any that would have been exposed to a lot of heat, something that would have significantly contributed to the capacitor failures on my Duron 1000's original board. Its cooler is only 40mm x 40mm x ~55mm and post board repair sees the CPU reporting ~60 degrees Celsius idle after running for half an hour.
The 994AN-L is even worse, as the FDD connector is between the AGP and first PCI slot - no AMR connector to space it out at least slightly.
Yeah, those drive connectors are really placed badly!
Maybe, one day, when I'm in the mood, I'll replace the other caps too.
The spot on the heat sink makes me think they etched it with an acid or something, just to try and remove a layer of oxide.
You may be right. Maybe it was also to just remove the old thermal interface. Surprisingly, the surface was totally smooth. If you look at the backplate of the CPU, you will also see some discoloration. Might have been some residue left that attached this surface too.
The problem where I live is that the new replacement capacitors sold here are worse than the ones on the board (the not bulging ones) so there is a big chance that even with replaced capacitors the board would not boot. So replacing the good capacitors is out of the question.
Very valid assessment! And you know, why trying to fix a working system. If spare parts are scarce, it is viable to leave it in its current working state. Those boards won't see a lot of action anymore.
Hi! my point is: all the capacitors have the same age, if one or more of them have problems, we should expect problems in a short term of the others that looks good. S, my opinion is replace all
I usually replace the same model / same area caps where issues appear. But usually you'll find different values and brands on the board. But yes, if you want to be on the safe side, then you can replace them all. It will just be a lot of work, but piece of mind. And better to replace groups of capacitors and not all at once - just in case something goes wrong you don't have to worry about the whole board.
Hello, I have an Abit KG7-RAID with an Athlon 1400 MHz Thunderbird CPU. Most of the larger capacitors have failed and I don't think I can restart it. I would have to either replace them myself or ship it to a repairman. Also, the Enermax 350 watt PSU probably also needs repairing. Why did they make such cheap undependable capacitors back then? {SIGH}
I kind of think that if you have bulging caps, then there is a reason why. If it's environmental then it's only a matter of time before the rest go too. So I think it's a good idea to do all of them in this case. Also anything from the 90's or 00's should be recapped if it has SMD caps. They were trash caps back then.
Not really, the capacitors around the CPU are typically of a higher electrical specification than the others scattered on the board.
This higher electrical specification often came at the expense of the lifespan of these capacitors. And this area tends to get much hotter than other areas of the board. So often you will find these boards have perfectly serviceable caps alongside others that have gone byebye!
nice video but pls show us how you replace capacitors, it is fun to watch, imo
I have the footage of replacing at least some of the caps, but somehow, the video got too long. The footage isn't that good because the boards are quite big and I need to work on both sides of the board. So, a lot of the footage isn't sharp. But I'll keep it in mind for the next recapping.
i wonder if the caps on the over heating motherboards are the issue.
From what he's shown it's the GSC branded caps which were like the top leader of the capacitor plague. I had an ePox motherboard on which basically all of them bulged and leaked over just a few years.
I wasn't sure about GSC, that's why I made sure it's shown in the video. Thanks for the info!
congratulate with find ! will there be benchmarks ?
like always, amd-boards have bulged capacitors, as if they were cursed))) i think, this related with using bad psu or psu with basic (powerful) +12 V line, & mb they had voltage ripplies on +5 V line => caps were bulging. better replace them all, is unknown, how long they`ll work. slot a wery rare, at least in russia & cic
Yes, there will be more content for AMD Slot A (and Socket A later) as well. I noticed yesterday that I do have a Athlon 700 Thunderbird (256 KB L2 cache) as well. The one in the video is Pluto (512 KB L2 cache). I'm curious myself to see how AMD is supposed to be 20% faster in games compared to Intel at the same frequency. I just need to find a Pentium III with a similar frequency.
@@bitsundbolts ok we`re waiting) by the way, i have pentium 3 600b (katmai, 133 mhz fsb), & i can do a test of it to compare, if needed........
Thanks for offering your assistance. I may also have similarly clocked CPUs. I have to go through my collection
my compaq 7954 with athlon 750mhz(thunderbird core) upgraded, 512mb ram geforce fx 5200 128mb 64bits agp.
Can Be Remove Top Plate To See Cpu?
I don't think so, the plate is bolted to the rest of the case. It would damage the case and potentially the PCB and CPU.
If you love the thing you will replace all the caps, but if you are practical you will only replace the bad ones.
It also depends on use, like if you only use it once a year replace only the bad, but if it's high use you do all, ie, no point spending $100 on caps when it's occasional use and there is no history of those caps leaking goo.
I worked in a PC shop when these were new. Jetway were just a cheap brand. VIA chipsets were terrible at the time. All sorts of crashes and bluescreens, every update of the inf driver improved the stability, and they ended up pretty good by the time they became obsolete.
Haha, yeah, that is what I remember from VIA. That is why I liked the nForce/2 chipset so much. They were solid and had good drivers as far as I remember. I loved my Athlon XP Barton 3200+ - I still have that PC and all it's components.
I prefer to use car shampoo rather than dish soap. I'm sure it makes no real difference but there are salts in dish soap whereas car shampoo is more designed with metals in mind. If rinsed well, it shouldn't matter, but it just makes me feel better.
That's a valuable tip! Thanks for sharing.
I skipped slot A. I jumped from super 7 to the AMD thunderbird (Socket A) That was one of my favorite computers. The next favorite was 2008 intel core 2 quad with nvidia nforce. And my next favorite is my 2021 build which is AMD Ryzen 5900x. The computers I didn't like as much are too many to count, but notable ones include an AMD Athlon XP mobile processor. My cousin gave it and the motherboard to me. I have no idea where he got it from. It was supposed to be a 64 bit generation, but it didn't have 64 bit support on it. Maybe it's because it was mobile. To this day I don't understand how and why that board and CPU existed. lol It was peculiar for sure. The other notable one was my Intel I7-2600. The CPU was amazing, but the motherboard was inferior to the nforce board in my opinion. As a result the core 2 quad wins. I'm still sad that nvidia boards aren't a thing because they were amazing, but my ryzen board is so rock solid.
Slot A had very short life anyway. In 7-8 months AMD switched to the Socket A, which turned out to be much more superior platform, lasting 3 years. 4 if you count lower end sempron cpus released alongside athlon64.
Had most of the customer platforms from the 90s/early 2000s (Socket 3, 4, 5, 7, Super7, A, 370, Slot 1) over the years but never had a Slot A platform. Feels like I missed something.^^
That placement of the floppy and IDE headers is the worst I have ever seen on a mainboard. What were they thinking? That it is 1999 and nobody is buying AGP graphics cards?
As long as capacitors are not bloated I don´t replace them. Have several Amiga 500, 1000, 2000 and 3000 here that are still on their original 1990s caps and run stable for hours.
Only if the system is not running stable for no apparent reason it is maybe a good idea to replace them all (or at least the ones delivering power to the CPU and memory slots).
By looking at their position on the mainboard you can guess what part of the board they are powering.
Yeah, the floppy and IDE connectors seem to have been an afterthought. I tend to leave the board in its current condition. The capacitors that did not have the bulging top tested fine in my circuit (also mhA draw), I believe the remaining caps to be ok. Also, the sound quality coming from the board is ok - so, I think those smaller caps are fine too.
@@bitsundbolts That bulging comes not from decomposing electrolyte (like you said in the video), it comes from an short in the capacitor that creates heat and makes the electrolyte boil. It then turns into steam and increases the pressure inside making the cover bulging. Next step would have been opening of the cap to vent steam. Some of the caps from the older video have already partially opened and you can see the dried electrolyte on the top of the caps. That was the harmless end of life for this caps, it also can happen that they simply explode, the metal part is flying through your computer and electrolyte is landing everywhere close to the cap with parts of the insulation material sticking to it. That dries and you are in a world of pain trying to clean the PCB from the sticky and smelly leftovers. ^^
While testing the caps the LED became dark as soon as the bulged cap was inserted, so it shorted the circuit and no power was flowing through the LED anymore.
Typical old caps dry out due to evaporation through the sealing (that is not tragic, they simply not reach the mA ratings printed on them), or they start to leak electrolyte through the bottom sealing leaving puddles of electrolyte next to them. That is bad, because the electrolyte is damaging the traces. That is a common problem with the younger Amigas that use SMD-components (600, 1200, 4000, CD32). If not treated for years leaking electrolyte becomes as worse as leaking batteries, it destroy the traces below them.
I have seen some badly leaking capacitors. The sooner you get the electrolyte off the PCB, the better. I would like to add to your explanation of electrolyte evaporation, that I've read somewhere that a chemical process occurs when electrons attach to the rolled-up metal membrane inside capacitors (sorry for probably using wrong terms here). This chemical reaction is the one that causes this thin metal sheet to degrade over time and turn a small amount of electrolyte into gas. It is a very slow process, but it occurs each time a capacitor is charged.
Your memory doesn't betray you. VIA drivers were a bit of a firecracker in the past, very temperamental. The lack of a good DLL version control in Win9x didn't helped.
Good that I'm not the only one having mixed feelings about the VIA drivers.
Not only did it use the Alpha EV100 bus, rumor has it that its FPU was essentially an x86 reverse engineering of the Alpha AXP floating point unit giving it a massive advantage over the Pentium PRO FPU of the Pentium II and III class Intel CPUs.
Infact im fairly sure the modern Ryzen CPU use a highly modernised version of the same APU in its "bones"
But this is educated speculation, I build PCs, I dont design CPUs but I do have a basic understanding of architecture. lol
I have a K7 "Athlon Classic" 700MHz version in one of my "Retroboxes", mated to a 3DFx Banshee. running 98SE, I had to build it because back when the K7 was new I wanted one so bad but couldnt hope to afford one at the time. (And yes I am an "AMD Fanboy")
Unfortunately it stopped working, and I suspect it died from bad capacitors, so yeah id suggest replacing yours.
AMD did acquire talent from DEC and NexGen to work on the K7 project. DEC was sold to Compaq in 1998 and the Alpha processor development was discontinued due to that. So yes, what you're saying makes a lot of sense!
Found a ATI 9800SE 128 mb today in the junkyard that would have suited this rig pretty well I'd imagine gonna test it later this week or tonight maybe if i get the energy after work to dig out a agp motherboard with a pentium 4 in it.
It's a generic oem version which probably will unlock the 8 pipelines if it works & has 128 mb ram in an L shape on both sides of the gpu, gpu cooler is not diamond shaped but square.
*update, card is dead.*
Scrambled stuff on the display on both dvi & vga oh well..
9550 will remain the best agp card i got for now then, also socket 775 agp motherboard is complaining about usb overcurrent protection even though nothing is plugged into usb*
Ah, sad that the card is dead. I wonder if it's memory related - which could be fixed by replacing it. I do have a few Radeon 9xxx cards as well. None of them are tested yet.
Replace all caps, they will just fail eventually. Caps from the late 80 and 90 were all manufactured from defective electrolyte. Also Would like to see how you replace the capacitors. What issues did you have.
With this board, I have no issues replacing the capacitors. I turn the board around, apply some flux on the soldered pins and alternate between them with the soldering iron. While holding the capacitor on the other side of the board, I move them back and forth, slowly taking each of them off the board.
I only replace bulged caps
I have one Slot A machine with AMD Irongate northbridge 😅 It's AGP-port is the most problematic I have ever used... Nvidias are out of luck even at AGP 1x mode but ATI and Voodoo3 works much better. Mobo is MSI MS-6167.
I have another Slot A motherboard, but I don't know which one and what chipset. But I did notice that I have an AMD Athlon 700 Thunderbird too! Face-off coming soon: Pluto vs Thunderbird and hopefully on two different motherboards!
@@bitsundbolts One thing I have learned is that the first Slot A-mobos doesnt officially support Thunderbirds so there can be random hangs here and there.
Interesting. I'll keep that in mind. I actually didn't know that there were two versions of the "same" CPU. But yesterday I looked inside both Slot A CPUs from the contacts side. The packaging is identical, but it's very visible that the Thunderbirds have the cache chips missing.
I think changing all the caps is cheap insurance, they will all fail eventually, even the small ones
Yes, and electrolytics will get more difficult to find in the distant future. Many already are. IMO, do them now.
It's just that this is a lot of work. But you are right, they will all eventually fail. For a retro machine, it may be ok to keep them for now since there is little usage. You may be able to replace electrolytic capacitors with solid capacitors. I did this on a P4B motherboard from ASUS. Works well so far.
I don't think the slot was turned 180 degrees for amd. I am pretty sure I have a couple intel slot mobo's here somewhere that have the slot oriented the same way as this athlon board.
It was indeed rotated. Slot A CPUs fit in Slot 1 when flipped, but the placement of the CPU + heatsink wouldn't fit as the heatsink would hit the back of the case, potentially capacitors, and the rear i/o ports.
I actually tried exactly that! A Pentium II/III fits in Slot A, and an Athlon fits into Slot 1 - you just need to turn the CPU 180 degrees for the other platform. Of course, NEVER do that! AMD CPUs won't work on Intel platform and vice versa from this generation onwards. And yes, if you try with a cooler, it won't fit - either it's the I/O connectors or capacitors that are in the way.
@@masejoer Oh I get it now, the board that the cpu is on and the slot are flipped, but the cpu and heatsink still stick out the same side so it appears to be the same.
Now that I think about it, I don't think I ever tried my amd slot cpu's in any other boards, lol.
Jetway is certainly... a manufacturer. Boards of that era were not considered reliable or nicely built. They did make some a lot more reasonable ones later on, but they also quit the mainstream market but kept on making ITX and specialised boards, if memory serves. Some early Jetway boards suspiciously match Lucky Star or Formoza, not sure how and if the companies are connected, and i'm yet to see a product from these two that wasn't garbage.
My logic when doing recaps is to lift a cap in each group of similar ones in same or similar circuits. If a certain value or group is bad, they're all getting the pull. If they still look unquestionably good on an LCR, i can put them back in if they aren't too critical. The CPU VRM ones are what i'd call critical, they aren't going back in, plus well just depends on the topology of the board what looks like it's critical or not. The little ones around the soundchip don't need to be pulled at all if it's not making audible trouble, they should be fine forever.
I don't think the remaining caps are too important, i wouldn't be inclined to pull them now if they don't feel like they're getting at all warm. If there's external or internal heat on any of them, do consider a replacement.
Dish soap wash is fundamentally a valid method, but i'm never quite sure about moisture stuck under BGA chips. You're "supposed" to use distilled water (pointless IMO when dealing with a badly contaminated board to begin with) and then bake it out in a drying oven, but i don't happen to have a suitable oven! When i did do the soap wash once or twice over the years, i dry the PCB for upwards of a week just in case, which makes me a little distrustful of the method, because leaving water in for too long is something i'd rather avoid. Why a week? Because i made an experience once 20 years ago that 24h wasn't nearly enough. Maybe if i lived in a desert, or indeed in an oven, i'd be of a different mind. Alcohol and residue-free brake cleaner are cheap enough that i usually just use them.
Yeah, if I didn't have the hot climate here, I would not trust 24 hours. Water is quite resilient in small gaps and below chips. It has to evaporate properly.
The water we have here in Dubai is desalinated seawater - and it leaves almost no residue on surfaces. So far, it's good enough and I haven't had any trouble using it.
Another theory for the Slot format was that Intel realized the i686 architecture greatly benefits from cache. On the PPro they had the cache on-die, with the result that if something was wrong with the cache the whole CPU package was wasted. With the cache close, but on separate chips they could increase production yield since they could be tested and swapped individually.
Yes, that is correct. The PPro had actually two separate dies if I'm not mistaken. That is why the CPU is so big - but they could only be tested together in the ceramic housing. If one of the chips was faulty, you had to trash the entire thing.
Install order ;=)
When recapping a board, I'd suggest replacing as needed instead of replacing everything. Just because a capacitor is old doesn't mean that it's failing too.
Of course, it does make sense to replace all of one specific type of capacitor. It's very likely that if one of the same type, brand and value have failed, then the rest on the board would be on their way out too. It's safe to assume they very likely came from the same batch during manufacturing.
I get it, it's a valid argument but the problem with that is capacitors don't always bulge or show other obvious signs when they're failing and you can't test them properly in circuit so if you've any suspicion they may be bad you have to remove them.
Unfortunately, no matter how good you are with a soldering iron/desoldering tool etc. removing them from the board can damage them, by overheating them and or mechanical forces.
So, when you've gone to the trouble of removing a capacitor that costs pennies to test it properly it's better to replace it to save damaging a rare board, CPU etc. or causing yourself more work in the near future.
9:05 that is a not good button battery test :) Youl should get a proper battery tester for that purpouse. When You check open ciruit voltage with a multimeter and get like 2.8V that voltage can be really a lot lower with just some more current drain from it than the multimeter takes :)
Most of the batteries I take out from those boards show 0V. So, I was surprised to see anything above 2 volts. But I get your point. It may be 2.8 volts, but nothing that can be sustainable. The moment any load is placed on the battery, voltage goes down significantly.
My quick test is to press down on both sides of the battery with my fingers. If skin resistance doesn't cause a measurable drop the battery is probably good enough to run an RTC, at least for the short term.
iI say dont replace them
That´s not a light bulb, please be precise