Hi folks, new poster, electronically challenged....
I hope you will be kind enough to help me, I face the following problem:
I have a motherboard in one of my PCs that has gone all flakey. It has bad
cap syndrome. The low ESR electrolytic aluminium can caps are bulging and
leaking. I know that this problem was rife around 2000/2001 but thought it
fixed by the time I bought this board, 2003. Sadly not true. The board
itself has been, up until the caps failed, an excellent, stable and very
useful bit of kit.
I have replaced capacitors on motherboards before with success so am not
worried about that side of things. My problem lies in the fact that I live
in New Zealand. It seems that it's just about impossible to get a handful of
caps the same specs as the ones on the board anywhere. I've found suppliers
in the US but not any who will ship *outside* of the US. As I assemble
computers for a hobby and used this same model mobo in a few different
builds for friends I'm expecting to see others with the same problem soon
too.
Ok, so the main caps I need are low ESR, 3,300uF, 6.3v, 10mm can, 5mm
lead-spacing (25mm high but that's unimportant, there's room to go higher)
electrolytic caps. I can't seem to source these anywhere in this wonderful
country of mine. I've been told I can get them in 15mm diameter cans which
is unacceptable as there is a row of five tightly satcked together. I've
tried for Nichcon and Rubycon first as I hear that these are good caps. The
local Nichicon agent said they don't have them ex-stock but could order them
in. A minimum order of 2K pieces and a 90-day turn-around! I need 5 for a
start, maybe another 20 later. You wouldn't believe how difficult a
seemingly easy thing like this has turned out to be.
So, to the advice I'd like: A year or two back, when I first struck
motherboards with bad caps a guy I met on a NZ newsgroup offered to get me
some suitable caps as part of his next order (which lead me to assume he was
"in the trade"). The caps needed for those three mobos I was hoping to fix
were the ame spec, 3,300uF 6.2v.... Anyway, the caps he sent me were 2,200
10v and he said the should be fine. He couldn't get the exact match. I went
ahead and fitted the caps and the motherboards worked fine. I still have one
of them running the PC I use for a stereo/mp3 jukebox that runs 24/7.
The board I'm currently looking to fix is (was) running an Athlon XP3200+ so
is still reasonably useful, I was expecting to get a few more years out of
it. The boards I repaired before using different spec caps were less
valuable so I wasn't so worried if it didn't work. However, I've been told
in a local newgroup that, often, caps on a mobo are specced +/- 50 to 100%,
that they are 'smoothing' caps. (They are right next to the CPU and the
first symptoms was unstable CPU core voltage).
My question to the collective here is: Do you folks think it would be
relatively safe to use 2,200 uF caps in this motherboard? It's worth quite a
bit more than the others I fixed and I can't afford to make a mistake with
it.
Kind regards, and thanks in advance,
