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Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.elitegroup (More info?)
Anyone has experience with having bad capacitors on their ECS P4VMM2
motherboard?
After 23 months of 24-7 non-stop crunching "SETI at home", mine just died
one day all of a sudden two weeks ago. It just lost all power, and refused
to power up again. At first I thought it must be the power supply, but I
soon found out it was worse. By elimination, everything else (power supply,
DRAM, drives, LAN card) checked out fine. The DRAM checked out OK in another
system. The power supply checked out fine in another system as well as fine
according to a multimeter.
So I took the motherboard out of the case and tested it on a wooden bench.
There is a distinct short on the motherboard somewhere. I won't bore you
with the rest of the details of how I troubleshot (but suffice it to say
that I have an electronics engineering degree). Dead CPU or dead
motherboard? Well, the CPU and the drives all tested fine with another
motherboard. I concluded that I have one very dead motherboard on hand!
I began examining the dead motherboard more closely. None of the capacitors
seems to be leaking, but the nine 3300uF electrolytic caps are all bulging
at the top, and there is a distinct odor coming from them. I did the
standard testing routines (crude, I know) on these caps using my multimeter,
and I noticed that their resistance did not steadily rise to "infinite"
ohm--which they were supposed to. All of them settled at about 29.7 ohm in
one direction, and only 27.6 ohm in the other direction! They did not even
get into the kilo-ohm range!
So now I have an expensive dead toy to improve on my soldering skills,
Anyone has experience with having bad capacitors on their ECS P4VMM2
motherboard?
After 23 months of 24-7 non-stop crunching "SETI at home", mine just died
one day all of a sudden two weeks ago. It just lost all power, and refused
to power up again. At first I thought it must be the power supply, but I
soon found out it was worse. By elimination, everything else (power supply,
DRAM, drives, LAN card) checked out fine. The DRAM checked out OK in another
system. The power supply checked out fine in another system as well as fine
according to a multimeter.
So I took the motherboard out of the case and tested it on a wooden bench.
There is a distinct short on the motherboard somewhere. I won't bore you
with the rest of the details of how I troubleshot (but suffice it to say
that I have an electronics engineering degree). Dead CPU or dead
motherboard? Well, the CPU and the drives all tested fine with another
motherboard. I concluded that I have one very dead motherboard on hand!
I began examining the dead motherboard more closely. None of the capacitors
seems to be leaking, but the nine 3300uF electrolytic caps are all bulging
at the top, and there is a distinct odor coming from them. I did the
standard testing routines (crude, I know) on these caps using my multimeter,
and I noticed that their resistance did not steadily rise to "infinite"
ohm--which they were supposed to. All of them settled at about 29.7 ohm in
one direction, and only 27.6 ohm in the other direction! They did not even
get into the kilo-ohm range!
So now I have an expensive dead toy to improve on my soldering skills,