Info Idiot damaged power supply cap by Me. Asus incapable of fixing it.

[RichardEckert2]

[Moderator Note: Edited post to break up one single "wall of text" paragraph. Also moving post from Motherboards to Opinions and Experiences.]

I was recently working on an Asus Prime-A x299 and I jamed my screw driver like a fool down into the capacitor of the power supply due to not thinking about what I was doing with the Noctua cooler.

It was one of the round ones and there are ten of them, so I figured I could attempt this myself, but when I dealt with asus on my P6X58D they were really great, not more. I sent the board in , got charged $50 bucks so they could tell me that their great technitions are incapable of knowing how to repair such damage. What a bunch of Donkey-Bites.

So I found some 560volt 6.3 volt capacitors,(it was difficult as Asus paints the caps so they don't let you read them easily), and I got the old cap out by pulling the round part off the solder lugs and then using a pair of needle nose Visegrip locking pliers, I weighted each lug, one at a time, and heated the the other side hole with a large Weller D550, 200/260watt, with a brand new tip(very important for maximum heat), and it took 45 seconds till the pliers dropped with the lug being pulled out.

I now had two almost holes, the cap would not go in. I had determined the direction of the cap as they give you a color mark on top to one side to match with the others as they fortunatly all go in the same direction. Now I had recenty bought some tiny drills but some were too small for my hand cranker so I found a thing called Microbox and they sell you a tiny drill driver thing and you have to use an awl to open the chuck up a bit , and I used two drills progressively smaller to larger and got good holes not too big either.

Now here is an important part. I hate new types of Eco solder, they are like under heated not well connected real lousy to work with, so I found my favorite Ersin core solder with rosin in it, pine sap, it smells really nice but it has lead so do not poison yourself enjoying how good poison lead can smell.

I bent the full length leads on the back, I did not use a heatsink on the other side as I could not find my mini alagator clips, so I heated this probably 20 seconds so the solder would flow. I have tried these repair son much older boards and ended up throwing them out as they died. I cliped the leads, check with ab awl to scrap between the solder joints and then assembled the computer again on a table.

The computer started, which it did before with the damged cap but this time it took a ram setting of 3600 with now error messages. If you damage your board, don't run it, fix it..

I have two of these motherboards and this one runs 10 degrees hotter, my other board runs at a 35C and this is runs about 43C. Can you believe those guys at Asus?,

I paid them fifty bucks so they could say "go strait to hell, customer". Now I will be more carfull with my screw driver and those old Noctuas.

A word to thee disenchanted, it can be done, so it is worth attempting. Tine may tell that this board breaks down, But I only set the ram timings ,3600 speed and 1.35 voltage(DDR4) on four modules of ram. I can't post a picture here so . -Dick Eckert

 

[RealBeast]

Yeah, the slip of a screwdriver can be very damaging. I often use sheets of fairly thick plastic that I have cut in various shapes and sizes to protect the board when I work at a distance on it.

Otherwise, I just pull the board out and do it on my desktop covered with cardboard since my blended bifocals limit my vision over a bit of the range for fine work.