Namrok wrote on 2020-10-09, 13:27:

khyypio wrote on 2020-10-09, 11:11:

Namrok wrote on 2020-10-08, 23:46:

So am I correct in assuming this board has some recapping in it's future? Mostly the two on the right.

20201008_192007.jpg

Those caps are on their way out, you need to replace them. And if you replace those two, you might as well replace the next ones too. I recapped my motherboard with Panasonic FR caps: download/file.php?id=87643&mode=view

It seems that most people don´t bother with the smallest caps, just the biggest ones and that´s what I did too.

Any advice? Once upon a time I bought a $20 soldering kit off Amazon for a Pi project I never actually got around to. Of course in all the videos I've watched people are rocking much more sophisticated soldering equipment.

I'm also seeing people just heating the existing solder enough to remove the cap, then shoving the new cap into it. This versus people removing all the old solder, and resoldering the joint fresh. Gotta admit, the first approach looks a lot more appealing to me. But it seems to be the minority approach.

Like Joseph_Joestar said above. If you haven´t done this before, you need to practice and you need to practice with motherboards in particular. Motherboards tend to have really thight cap mounts so you need to have experience and, most of all, patience. So find some useless, worthless, valueless and readily broken old mobos. Also, buy some cheap caps to practice attaching .

Get a decent, adjustable soldering iron with a holding rack. To remove the solder get a solder vacuum and copper wick, also some flux. If I were you, I´d go to your neighborhood component retailer and tell them about the project, they´ll provide you with proper equipment.

So, I haven't recapped the Shuttle 591P. But a $15 auction I won for a PC Partner MVP3BS7 finally showed up. It shipped from Kiev. Caps all look good and it POSTed. So I pulled out the Shuttle board, and threw in the PC Partner board, and updated it's bios. Went ahead and swapped the Pentium 233 MMX with a K6-2+ 500, and the Riva 128 with a TNT2. Also threw in 256 MB of PC100 ram. So now the smoking hot 1997 machine has become a pretty ok 1999 machine. See how things go on it.

GLQuake sure looks a heck of a lot better without the Riva 128's notorious image quality problems. The output to the monitor looks a lot cleaner too. Not sure if it was my imagination, but I was beginning to wonder if the system with the Shuttle board was beginning to act a bit wonky. At first StarCraft would crash, but only when I launched it off the CD autoplay menu. Then it just started throwing BSOD's originating from an unknown VXD file. So one driver or another. I updated the Via chipset drivers and it actually went away and got back to normal. But still, those caps worried me. When I took the board out, I'd swear they were bulging more than when I first noticed.

In the meantime, I suppose I should practice soldering to one day repair the Shuttle board.

Ok, one more post script.

The SBLive began having severe crackling and popping issues. I first noticed them when I installed Drakan and the main menu was almost exclusively popping and crackling. Noticed it ever so slightly in Planescape Torment during the intro movies, and when EAX was turned on in game. Then I noticed it pretty badly in The Sims as well.

Tried everything under the sun. All manner of BIOS settings attempting to sooth the needs of the SBLive, the only device on it. Turned off DMA for my IDE devices. Turned off PCI#2 Access #1 Retry, which did a lot to fix it in some applications. Like the EAX demo and Planescape. Drakan was still a nightmare. Turned off a few more PCI features I saw recommended. Applied a bunch of registry optimizations for Win9X like AGPConcur, PCIConcur and CPUPriority. FastDRAM I think caused system instability. Installed the W98se SP3, along with the optimizations. All that actually boosted my 3DMark99 performance from about 2500 to 3000. So that was nice. Really nice. But it didn't fix my SBLive cracking issues.

I think what finally did it was a utility I found on an archived version of geforcefaq.com. You plop it in your startup folder, and it sets the PCI Latency to 0 for MVP3 motherboards. Fixed me right up. Now even Drakan, the worst offender, sounds perfect.

I may start rolling back some of the other attempts at fixes I tried. Especially turned DMA back on for my IDE devices. But that felt like a fix I aught to document. Took a lot of google fu to finally find it.

So in short, MVP3 chipsets + Sound Blaster Live = Set PCI Latency to 0, either through the BIOS if that's an option, or through the old geforcefaq.com utility.