VOGONS


First post, by mantis_toboggon

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Hey all, long time lurker here, but finally made an account! Anyways, I started recapping some of my socket A boards I have lying around with bad (bulged) capacitors. I am polymodding most of them, did an Asus A7v8X like 5 years ago when I first found this site and it worked great. My plan is to recap all my boards and then see which ones overclock best and probably share the results here. I have at least 4 Nforce 2 boards, an Iwill with the Ali Magik, a Soyo Dragon KT333, etc. Some of the boards have the P4 12v connector, and some don't meaning they will be power hogs on the 5v rail. I decided to dig through my power supplies and found I have an Enermax EG465P-VE which has 44 amps available on the 5v rail, I think I bought that new way back when. I also have another enermax that I bought NOS on ebay a few years ago and a cap blew up when I tried to test it, I'll have to go find where I stashed that. So to finally get to the point of the post, I have decided that I should probably recap my PSUs if I'm doing the motherboards, because whats the point if I'm sending them garbage power from a PSU with bloated, junk caps. So I pulled the cover off the 465P-VE, and while none of the caps are bloated, they are all PCE-Tur caps which from my research aren't the greatest Chinese made caps and also they are at least 20 years old now. I did manage to track down a datasheet for them that lists ripple specs, but not ESR. Now looking around on here and Badcaps I found a lot of people agreeing that in these older power supplies you cannot Polymod them and you shouldn't use ultra low ESR capacitors or you might end up with more ripple or oscillation. So I've been browsing all over mouser trying to pick out the caps I want to use, at first I was going to get all Rubycon YXJ series which are low but not ultra low ESR and have ripple specs a bit higher then the ones I am replacing. But then I found some people have succesfully used Panasonic FC/FM/FR or one of the Rubycon ZLx series. What I am trying to figure out is how low can I go on ESR before I should be concerned considering I can't find the ESR specs on my originals? For example I have ten Panasonic FM 4700UF 6.3V on the way for a KT133A, that needs 6 and they would work great to replace the 3.3v and 5v output filter caps.

Reply 1 of 2, by Horun

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Yeah if search is correct it is from about 2003. Yes you cannot use super low ESR caps, the outs were not designed for it, it will not only possibly cause more ripple but can completely fail as if you never replaced them.
If the replacement caps for the KT133A match the originals board for ESR then they "may" work OK. If the replacements have a lower ESR then no do not try it. Most PSU of that era did not use low ESR, the output caps were more general filtering/storing than what is found on the VRM's of the motherboards. Think of it as getting 120v/240v to a stable +/-5% 3.3v, 5v and 12v versus taking one of the lower volts to get 1.8v super stable. So less ESR rating for the PSU than for the VRM.
sorry am tired and is all I got right now 😀

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 2 of 2, by mantis_toboggon

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Thats kind of what I figured was the case, going to low on ESR would cause more problems than its worth. I was just getting my mind wrapped up on the idea that well if I am going through the time and effort to do the recap, I might as well get some really nice capacitors! Probably best to get some low esr within reason caps of good quality. I did find three other power supplies I'm going to recap, a Enermex 365P-VE, Enermax 365P-V, and a Thermaltake Pure Power 420w. Tested all four last night on an A7V333 with an XP1700, and tried out my new scopemeter for the first time measuring ripple, so I will be able to do a before and after and see if new capacitors make an improvement there. Thanks!