Pop Goes the Motherboard

Well, this hasn't been fun. My computer gradually gets more unstable, random freezing and rebooting and I foolishly put it down to randomness. Eventually it gets so unstable it won't even get through the memory check before rebooting.

So I open the lid (or at least, clear all the stuff out the way) so I can look inside and reseat the memory. I thought that seemed the most likely culprit. Ha.

Things didn't look too bad. But then I noticed a brown blotch on the top of one of the caps. "That's odd", I thought, "Oh well". Then I reseated the memory.  No change.  Hrm.

So I took everything out of the case, and had a closer look at the motherboard. "That's odd", I thought, "some of the caps are leaning at funny angles". Another look. "That's odd, there's black stuff coming out the bottom of that capacitor. And that one. Oh, and that one. There too. Oh, bother".

Now I decide to turn the motherboard over:

Now, I think you'll agree with me here, you don't really want to see this. Underneath one of the regulators for the processor things seem to have got a little hot. And there's yet more black stuff. Out with the soldering iron:

Oooh, look. They've all popped their little black rubber seals. This probably affects their performance. I bet you're wondering what the motherboard looked like underneath:

It's not looking good, is it? Also note the pinkish tinge around the left hand regulator. That's the one that got hot enough to discolour the motherboard.

"Anyway", I thought, "at least it's just the processor power supply. I can change those caps".

Another look.

The red dots show the remaining broken caps. Now I don't know a lot about motherboard design, but I'm guessing the ones near the SDRAM slots are for smoothing the 3.3V supply to them. These capacitors are supposedly rated at 6.3V. The other capacitors are rated either as 10V or 16V and seem to be ok.

I'm slightly disappointed, and felt this was clearly all Abit's fault, but then a friend sent this link to the Register. It looks like I've been the victim of a multinational coporate espionage bungle:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/29222.html
This links to:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/feb03/ncap.html
which has pictures looking eerily similar to mine.

The upshot of all this? I need to buy some capacitors or a second hand Slot-A Athlon motherboard. And find a soldering iron that some kid hasn't used to melt a glue stick from those glue guns.

25/6/03

Update: I got myself some caps and a soldering iron, cleared out the vias, soldered the caps in, and hey presto! it works. Hurrah. Obviously there are some more details (like fitting the larger can caps into the same space as the old caps, and which iron I bought, and how to clear the old solder out of the ground vias), but that can wait for a bit. Sorry.