Fixing Your Motherboard for $15

[malici0usc0de]

I wonder if a bran new mainboard that had sat too long would suffer from degraded capacitors or if the wear to them only occurs during operation of the mainboard. Is there such a thing as a solid state capacitor?

 

[Bonzo]

[sarcasm]
I like the way some people say "what's the worst that can happen?" I mean, you could only end up killing whatever components (RAM, CPU, Graphics etc) you put in the board??!! Perfectly acceptable risk obviously.
[/sarcasm]

 

[4745454b]

WOW, What a bad article! $15? Where can I buy all those parts for only $15? I'd buy three sets and sell two on ebay for extra money... Values on the cap? You didn't even explain what they are! Is it safe to replace a 1000uf cap with a 1200? Is 110degree ok to replace a 105? Are you going to have any problems with using a 10V instead of the 6v? (answers are no, yes, and no.)

Don't change the cap value, you should use a 1000uf. The other numbers are values of what the cap can handle. If you need a cap that can handle 105, but put in a better cap that works up to 120, then your ok. Same with the voltage. If your cap needs to be able to handle 6V, but you used one that can handle 10V, your good.

For anyone wondering, use a very low wattage iron. The one I used was either a 15 or 25W. Heat one tip at a time and rock it out. After that, seeing as you didn't suck any solder out, grab a steel dental pick and CAREFULLY(!) open the hole. (use steel so that solder doesn't stick to it.) You'll need to hit the hole from both sides with the dental pick. Once the hole is open, orientate the cap, and solder it into place. My slot A server died several months ago and I did this (with help from badcaps.net) to replace the blown cap. It worked for ~6months with no problems before it started displaying the same symptoms. I guess I should have replaced all the caps...

Seriously, if your not going to write the entire article and explain everything, DON'T WRITE IT! Car articles and this, no wonder I'm reading other sites now.

 

[wild9]

If you get some blocked solder in the hole after de-soldering, try re-fluxing the joint, wait a while for it to cool down then suck it out. This should do the trick.

During this procedure it's crucial not to apply the iron as well as the de-soldering tool too long, otherwise you'll end up damaging the board.

 

[Crashman]

You never have to clear the hole and you should use a VERY HOT iron and work QUICKLY. Use a HIGH WATTAGE iron and work very fast to prevent the heat from getting sucked out by the motherboard's GROUND PLANE.

I burned a board once because my solder iron didn't produce enough heat.

 

[bman917]

From the article: "Exchanging your motherboard might entail undesired additional costs for the purchase of a new processor and new RAM."

If a motherboard will be replaced by a supplier, why will the CPU and RAM need to be replaced as well? Can't they just be removed from the defective motherboard and installed in the replacement?

 

[Crashman]

Arguing semantecs maybe? Change the word "exchange" to "change" and then it will make sense.

 

[wild9]

From the article: "Exchanging your motherboard might entail undesired additional costs for the purchase of a new processor and new RAM."

If a motherboard will be replaced by a supplier, why will the CPU and RAM need to be replaced as well? Can't they just be removed from the defective motherboard and installed in the replacement?

I beleive it could be a problem if you have old Socket technology, or CPU support that was later dropped. The supplier may be unable to source a board and will replace it with it's modern equivalent..I am not so sure about the manufacturer of the board but even if that were feasible, you'd still be using old technology as opposed to going out and getting a new board with all the latest features for a good price..

The 'capacitor curse' happened around the Millennium, hence at the time I had bought my cousin a nice new Asus board complete with a Celeron 600. About 4 yeas later the caps leaked and the system became unstable - the supplier was willing to replace it but said it would have to be an equivalent board, costing $28 shipping.

My cousin kept the board for an electronics repair project, sold the CPU (which was a decent overclocker even if it's performance was wanting), and spent the money on an AMD rig.

Low and behold my Brother's Gigabyte board did exactly the same..a Socket A board with a Duron 850. I didn't blame Gigabyte or Asus as the problem was the cap supplier, but I was able to fix his board with some dirt-cheap caps. I did not have much confidence in fixing his board mainly due to the prospect of working on PTH soldering with no professional tools, but we did it in the end

 

[BushLin]

interesting, i have a Dell Optiplex 270 mobo i might try this on

Even though it's out of warranty, Dell will still replace GX270 motherboards as every single one has or will fail due to capacitor failure.

 

[AdamBomb42]

interesting, i have a Dell Optiplex 270 mobo i might try this on

Dell extended the warranty on the optiplex 270, call them and have them send you a new board.

 

[eRazor]

If you apply too much pressure to the metal pin, you might cause crazes in delicate circumjacent conducting paths.

8O You guys seriously need to consider hiring an editor.

I would have prefered he use "adjacent" or "surrounding", but the meaning is the same. Toe-may-toe toe-mah-toe.

English is obviously not the author's primary language, as there are gramatical, tense, and spelling errors. Since THG is published in several languages, I think we can cut him some slack. It was a good article, mistakes notwithstanding.

 

[g13man]

I miss my pace station. learned multi layer board repair in the 70's when they where just starting multi layer . if you read this far , you got all the hints you need. .. but do not use to high or low a wattage soldering iron [mines a 35 watter]

 

[I]

I have only replaced caps once on an Aopen AK73-1394. It was for a low-income family that couldn't afford a new board and I didn't have another Socket A board available. The Taiwanese caps around the CPU failed but the rest of the caps on the board were Japanese and didn't have any problems. I have many years of soldering experience so it wasn't difficult for me even without a desoldering station. But it is not an easy job for most people. The primary problem is getting the caps out without pulling out the plating inside the hole.

That should not be a problem. It does not matter if the plating comes off because soldering on the new cap will just fill, replate it. If you meant pulling the whole insert out, not just the plating on the insert, it is also not a problem if one merely does not pull on the capacitor when the solder is not yet molten. It is more durable than you think so long as typical good soldering practices are followed.

Doing so can short out the internal copper planes and render the board useless or potentially damage the CPU.

Except that it's not at all likely to happen if you merely wait for the solder to melt before pulling on the cap. Those holes are not very fragile at all, in fact I have serviced many boards where someone knocked the capacitor so hard that it pulled the leads out of the cap body but the hole was still perfect. I tend to think a more likely problem is if someone uses an iron that is not hot enough so they subject the area surrounding the hole to too much heat before the solder melts around power and ground planed holes, or they tried to use too large a tip and couldn't get a good contact with the hole without touching adjacent traces, or if they had shakey hands and let the iron slip. Some boards now seem to have very tight tolerances around cap leads.

I preheated the component side of the board to 150°C by putting it over a special preheater (a heat gun could also be used) and desoldered the pins using a large-tip 50W iron and braid. Tip: If the solder doesn't want to flow then add new solder to it.

Do NOT preheat it like this. It has no useful purpose. The whole point is to keep everything as cool as possible except the one spot being desoldered. While pre-heating might reduce the amount of time it takes to melt the solder it does nothing more than would happen if you just left the iron on the spot for a moment longer because that spot still had to reach the same melting point either way. If the iron can't do the job it is best to just get a more appropriate iron.

 

[I]

You can do this without expensive tools. A reasonable $20 soldering iron is a longer-term investment than one motherboard is, and if you had to do without the desoldering pump it's still possible.

By alternating the heating of one hole with the iron and gently pushing the cap a little in the opposite direction you can wiggle it out a little, then heat the other hole and push in the other direction. Take your time and it will come out so long as you wait till the solder is molten to push.

After the cap is out you can use the needle to clear the hole as the article picture showed. One thing worth mentioning is the needle diameter does have to be as large as the cap lead. In this method you will have more solder (after adding more to solder in the new cap) than is ideal but it can still work out ok so long as you get the solder flowing good (a basic soldering requirement regardless of this mobo-cap replacement topic). If you had flux you could just reflow the existing solder instead.

If you're so hard up you don't even have a needle and pliers to clear the hole you could just pre-cut the cap leads a little shorter then reheat the hole while gently rocking the cap back in, the reverse of how you got the old one out. Just don't overdo it, trying to rock it too far each time.

I wouldn't advise drilling. I have done so successfully but this was with a bench press not a hand drill and the tolerances make choosing the right sized bit very critical. Without a lot of experience drilling and a hand drill instead of a press, it would be far too easy to drill right through the side of the hole. Further, since the whole point was clearing the hole, there may be enough solder in it that you can't easily get the bit started dead-center in the hole.

If you insist on trying to drill it then I'll at least mention that the bit size I found most appropriate was a #73 as that is barely larger than the typical lead diameter on many name-brand 8-10mm caps while still smaller than the hole. Some 12.5mm diameter caps have larger leads, too large for a #73.

 

[MaximRecoil]

From the article:

Professional de-soldering tools are essential for soldering work. Neither manual soldering irons nor de-soldering pumps are suitable, since heating and removing the soldering tin has to take place in a single process. Otherwise, the soldering tin will stiffen again immediately. The motherboard's mass layer deducts a lot of heat, which makes de-soldering impossible.

This is pure bunk and it only indicates that he does not know how to use a manual desolder pump ("solder sucker") properly. Of course the "heating and removing the soldering tin has to take place in a single process", which is exactly what happens when you use a solder sucker correctly.

I worked in a PCB factory from '98 to '00, inspecting and soldering (both through-hole and surface-mount) about 1,000 boards a night. The boards we built were part of large fire alarm systems, like you would see in a hospital or school. As an example, Disney World in Florida used our fire alarm systems. The equipment we built was categorized as "life saving equipment", and as such, they were very picky about the quality of work.

Most of building of the boards was done automatically on multi-million dollar Panasonic SMT machines which were massive, as well as wave solder machines for through-hole components. For some of the components (e.g., terminal blocks), it wasn't practical to have them soldered automatically, which is where my line came in. We also did inspection, so any problems we could see with the SMT stuff, or that showed up later during the HP3070 tests, we would rework by hand.

First, if you are going to get a manual solder sucker, get the original and best, i.e., a fullsize Edsyn Soldapullt, such as the model DS017 (about $20). We used these along with the "ESD safe" variants (DS017LS, and AS196) at work. These are commercial grade tools and they are very common, and see very heavy usage, in most any PCB factory, for rework purposes.

We also had the expensive, automatic desoldering tools (hooked up to shop air in our case) like the author used in the article (ours were better in fact, made by Metcal), but no one (at least not on my shift) used them. They were usually gunked up, they were not at every station so you had to get up and go to them (whereas everyone was issued their own Soldapullt), they were cumbersome, relatively slow, and in general, did not work as good as a quality manual solder sucker. I could desolder 40 or 50 through-hole terminal blocks (each block having 4 posts) in just a couple minutes with a Soldapullt, which would be necessary when a new-hire would solder a whole board's worth of blocks on backwards, or use the wrong type of blocks altogether.

We had solder wick as well, but there really isn't much use for it. It is not intended for desoldering in order to remove components, but rather to clean up any excess solder after removing the component, if you want to (there is generally no need to do so).

Regarding irons, a $7 Radio Shack special will work fine for the banyard-basic task of replacing caps on a board. At work we had $500 Metcal STSS and MX series soldering stations, which are the greatest thing since spray cheese (you'd never keep up in a production environment with anything less than a Metcal, that is, if everyone else was using Metcals). I recently bought a used Metcal STSS-002 station for myself, but it is overkill for home use -- that is, you don't need the precision, ergonomics, +/- 1 degree tight temperature regulation, and lighting fast recovery times of a Metcal to change a few caps here and there or for general purpose electrical soldering. Before I got the Metcal recently, I'd replaced plenty of caps along with other various soldering tasks on arcade machine monitors and motherboards in the 7 years since I worked at EST, with a crappy $7 Radio Shack iron. Knowing what you are doing is the important part.

I'm just posting all of this because there is no reason to be discouraged from doing your own soldering repairs if you don't have expensive equipment. The author claims it is necessary, but it most certainly is not.

 

[Mugz]

There is a distinct reason why they write such articles in that way.

They make people think that they'll need professional tools, because the people who know how to do this and know how to use hobbyist/common tools are the ones who can do this in the first place.

An electronics noobie is going to turn a motherboard into an expensive paperweight like this, unless (s)he has the pro tools. An experienced electronics professional can precision solder with a nail, pair of pliers and a cigarette lighter, believe it or not. A complete dunce (like 90% inclusive of humanity, race/colour/creed/qualification notwithstanding) should be firmly discouraged from doing anything even remotely technical.

Also, the higher the quality of tool, the less chance of a problem arising due to repairs.

 

[PooBear]

You obviously don´t have friends...

What are those? :lol:

Ha ha lol classic come back 😀

 

[MaximRecoil]

An experienced electronics professional can precision solder with a nail, pair of pliers and a cigarette lighter, believe it or not.

I learned to solder when I worked at EST. Before that soldering had never even crossed my mind for anything, so I had no reason to own an iron. So sometime between the time that I was soldering 8 hours a night as a job, and before I saw fit to buy a soldering iron for home use, my remote control for my VCR, which was over 10 years old at the time, and had been working intermittently for a few of those years; stopped working altogether. I took it apart and noticed a cracked fillet on one of the battery compartment posts. I didn't have a soldering iron at home, but I had a propane torch and a flat-bladed screw driver. I heated up the tip of the screw driver, reflowed the joint and the remote works to this day, though I have little use for a VCR anymore.

 

[vic20]

I love it when the solder melts that easy

Sometimes it's a little more challenging. I've come across a few motherboards that required a ridiculous amount of heat for the solder to melt. With these one boards I whip out the big solder gun and work very fast.

I'm guessing its the difference bewteen wave soldering (hot solder bath) and reform soldering (baked solder paste).

 

[MaximRecoil]

Solder that requires more heat than usual to melt is probably lead-fee solder, like has been around for a long time for plumbing applications, and is now working its way into electronics applications:

No doubt lead-free soldering does offer its set of challenges. The lead-free alloys being proposed as the main choices for general assembly are new and less data is available as to their process limits. The two main alloys are variants of Tin-Silver-Copper and Tin-Copper. These alloys have higher melting temperatures and wet metal surfaces more slowly, the joints also look different in that the surfaces are not as reflective as tin-lead joints. The flux chemistries that worked well with a leaded process are not the best fit for lead-free soldering.

As more and more lead-free soldered boards are produced in Asia and Europe [...]

http://www.kester.com/en-us/leadfree/index.aspx

Now I can see wanting to use lead-free solder in plumbing, that's a given, but for electronics? All it does is make the job harder and the results less reliable (no one is going to be eating off PCB's). Another case of "leadphobia" I suppose.

BTW, the best solder alloy to use for PCB's is 63% tin (Sn) and 37% lead (Pb) AKA "63/37" from companies like Alpha Metals or Kester.

 

[Shin-san]

I had an old Abit kg7-raid motherboard and I had a few projects on the hard drives. Unfortunately, the board's capacitors bled and I missed the Abit recall by a few months.

I was saving up for another motherboard anyways, and since I needed to turn in a project soon, I had to overnight parts from newegg (which turned out to be cheaper than buying locally) with a new board and CPU. Luckily both boards used DDR1 ram. If I knew about repairing the board, I would have tried fixing the board before replacing it.

This doesn't seem too hard, though it would have been nice if they used simpler tools for their examples.

 

[Crashman]

Now I can see wanting to use lead-free solder in plumbing, that's a given, but for electronics? All it does is make the job harder and the results less reliable (no one is going to be eating off PCB's). Another case of "leadphobia" I suppose.

BTW, the best solder alloy to use for PCB's is 63% tin (Sn) and 37% lead (Pb) AKA "63/37" from companies like Alpha Metals or Kester.

They don't really care about you specifically, they care about selling worldwide and thus must meet ROHS standards.

 

[MaximRecoil]

They don't really care about you specifically

What does caring about me have to do with anything? I haven't worked in the PCB industry for 7 years, and most anything I work on for myself is from the 80's (e.g., PCB's found in 80's arcade machines).

they care about selling worldwide and thus must meet ROHS standards.

That doesn't change the ridiculousness of it. To increase costs and decrease quality in the name of some irrational feel-good crusade against lead is ridiculous by default.

 

[Crashman]

To increase costs and decrease quality in the name of some irrational feel-good crusade against lead is ridiculous by default.

You're still skipping the "steps in the middle", such as making a law and getting it passed. They produce boards to meet ROHS standards because they couldn't import them otherwise. The motherboard companies pretend their making a conscientious effort, but in reality they're just trying to survive. For them, it's "in the name of survival"

You have to go up the chain of social order to find the feel good crusade responsible for this disaster.

 

[vic20]

I would be happy if they made a law limiting the amount of plastic used in packaging toys. This would help the world better than non-leaded mobos IMO.