[Gllug] Power Supply loaner in West London?

Russell Howe rhowe at wiss.co.uk
Thu Sep 23 16:55:45 UTC 2004


On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 06:00:44PM +0100, Phil Reynolds wrote:
> One point to check - I have noticed this on P3 and P4 boards - are all
> the electrolytic capacitors looking normal or is there any kind of
> swelling, corrosion or leakage? I have had three boards go down within
> the last 18 months with this definite problem.

I have this problem with a socket A board. After upgrading my monitor, I
started to run my Matrox G450 at its limit. The capacitors which I
assume formed part of the switching power supply for the AGP socket
went, and the machine became exceptionally unstable.

Took those 3 capacitors out, and the board actually booted, X loaded,
etc and everything worked!

I'm not running that board at the moment though - I removed all the
capacitors of that brand and am just waiting for the time/inclination to
order and solder in some replacements.

The board was a KT7-RAID, btw.

Spotting the doming on the capacitors is sometimes quite hard, but just
hold the board up to the light and see if it reflects evenly off the top
of the caps - it's sometimes very hard to check if the board is in a
case.

Another cause for voltage fluctuations is failing/incorrectly specced
regulators (I've been told they're not actually regulators, though, but
I'll still call them that :). I have a couple of Abit BP6's, which are
infamous for having an underspecced capacitor, and a suspect regulator
onboard, which causes one of the voltage lines to fluctuate more than it
should. This has been said to make the board unstable, but I can't say
I've noticed... I keep meaning to replace the parts, but just not got
around to it...

There's a crazy Japanese guy who actually modified the board so that
it'd take P3s instead of P2s/P2 Celerons. Not a great deal of soldering
involved, but some. I keep meaning to find some cheap S370 P3s on ebay
and trying this, but not until the KT7-RAID is back up and running.

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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