@obobskivich: I've got a spare Sapphire Radeon 7000 PCI lying around, although a FX 5200 would probably be a smarter choice. I also noticed the generous spacing, which means my spare stock Athlon XP 2500+ cooler (which I modified with a 60mm Noctua Fan) will fit perfectly. I can even run it on 5V or 7V since the 30W TDP Celeron isn't going to challenge it that much.

I scanned through the manual quickly and I picked up that you can manually assign a lot of IRQs to different PCI cards. I've got a Sound Blaster 128 PCI (which Creative claims has good DOS-Mode support). If I assign IRQ7 to a particular PCI slot, should I be able to get some DOS gaming done? Or should I rather just stick to using the DOS Box in Windows 9x?

If it works like the DOS emulation of the SBLive!, the IRQ you plan on using for the ISA SB emulation should be free. Just leave the SB128 PCI in whatever IRQ it decides to grab, and install the DOS drivers.

Cool! I'll try that. I let the guy know that I'm interested, but he hasn't gotten back to me yet, so I'll have to wait. He says he has a Socket 754 board and a high-end video card with bad capacitors that he'll give to me for free. So I'm quite interested to hear what he's got.

Update: I am picking up an EPoX EP-3VBM+ and EPoX EP-3BXA tomorrow from someone who claims the boards aren't working. The 3VBM+ doesn't POST and the EP-3BXA has bad capacitors and won't boot with the RAM the individual has. So there could be a good opportunity there. I'll put some photos on tomorrow.

Look around for an old PC Socket 370 440BX chipset motherboard. I have a Gigabyte GA-6BX7 which I obtained a couple of years ago and it's very stable. There should still be a few of these floating around in SA since Rectron was (still is, actually) a big supplier of Gigabyte products. It's got enough slots for any scenario. AGP, 5x PCI and 2x ISA. The bottom PCI and top ISA are shared, but you'd only ever really need to use 1x ISA slot anyway.

I personally prefer my Slot1 systems, but it looks like you'd be better off with a faster Socket 370. Finding a slot1 CPU faster than 550MHz locally will prove difficult unfortunately.

Thanks Totempole! I actually acquired an EPoX board with the 440BX chipset. It has a severe case of Badcaps. I haven't found the time to take photos of it yet, but it has horrible Teapo and GSC capacitors on it.

Edit: Here are some photos of the two boards:

and

If you inspect the EP-3BXA board you will see that the 1000uF and 2200uF capacitors are bad and need to be replaced. I can get United Chemi-Con KY series capacitors for a good price and they are known to be good and reliable. I *hope* this will solve the issues for the EP-3BXA board, the other problem is that the some of electrolytic capacitor fluid has dripped and burnt onto the board. I suppose I would have to give it a good scrubbing then. Will it be okay if I wash it using a paint brush, 90% isopropyl alcohol, some dishwashing liquid, warm water and then rinse it with distilled water and leave to dry outside for a couple of days until the new capacitors arrive? Should I replace the little capacitors too?

Okay, I've been compiling the list of capacitors I need to order for these two boards and I've got a bit of a problem: on the EP-3BXA board you get two types of 100uF capacitors, namely a short one and a longer (standard sized) one. The capacitors are GSC brand and from what I've read they're right down there with the worst of the worst capacitors. Should I replace them? If I do, then I'm going to have to use Panasonic OS-CON capacitors (yup, through-hole polymer capacitors) since they are short enough to fit in front of the ATX connector. Just so you can fully appreciate a problem, here is a photo:

There are 5 100uF capacitors: the three smaller ones are 16V and the two larger ones are 25V. The three middle ones are shorter so that you can attach the ATX connector to the board. They have a diameter of about 6.3mm and I suspect a height of no more than 7mm. My local supplier doesn't have low ESR electrolytic capacitors with a height close to that. You can clearly see that there's about a 4-5mm difference in height between the two. This is the only place on both the boards where the height of the 100uF capacitor matters.

When I got my GA-6VTXE last year, it had bulging caps and stability issues during Windows 98 installation.

I didn't replace all the caps, just the very large ones. That fixed it and it's not a super stable Tualatin board 😀

I went with Panasonic capacitors, not cheap, but considering how much time your invest in de-soldering and re-capping such a board, might as well get something decent.

It's my understanding that you don't need to replace capacitors smaller than 470 uF in 95% of cases. But I've read so many bad things about these GSC capacitors that I'm thinking this is one of those other 5% of cases where you need to replace them all.

From the little information I could get, it seems like the 100uF GSC capacitors are general purpose. I can get Rubycon ML series capacitors from RS Electronics. Will this work? What exactly are those small capacitors at the ATX connector for?

Edit: I've attached a shopping list of capacitors that I plan on buying, any comments will be welcome.

Since this topic wasn't anal enough, I decided to "draw" a capacitor map for the EP-3BXA board:

The delivery of my capacitors got delayed by a week, thanks to South African Customs taking their time inspecting my shipment, so I decided to clean the EP-3BXA and remove the bad capacitors today. I used tap water, some dish-washing liquid, some Cleen Green I rinsed the board with tap water and gave it a final rinse with distilled water. I went over all of it with another paint brush that I dipped in rubbing alcohol and I blew most of the water out with an air compressor. Here are some pictures of the final result:

In the above photo you will notice there's some discolouration in the PCB. From the looks of things a 2200uF capacitor exploded in that area. There was capacitor residue everywhere. Luckily it cleaned off pretty easily. Here are some photos of this "problem" area:

On a lighter note, it was interesting to see that the EP-3BXA has a SB-Link connector, this is not mentioned anywhere in the manual:

Before I continue on my journey to nowhere, can anyone offer any advice on how to clear the remaining solder in the through holes? I only have solder wick (which was a disaster since I almost burnt through the trace) and a manual solder sucker. I'm going to leave it to try for the next 2-4 days and hopefully it will post when I install the new capacitors.

Evert wrote:

Before I continue on my journey to nowhere, can anyone offer any advice on how to clear the remaining solder in the through holes? I only have solder wick (which was a disaster since I almost burnt through the trace) and a manual solder sucker. I'm going to leave it to try for the next 2-4 days and hopefully it will post when I install the new capacitors.

Sometimes I just melt the solder and work the new cap through without actually clearing the hole. It helps to add solder so you get better thermal contact.
Another method is to melt the solder and push a stainless steel pin into it. Solder won't stick to that, so after it cools you can twist it and remove, leaving a hole.
I've used a "safety pin", which I don't actually know what it's made out of, but solder doesn't seem to stick to it so it works. It's a tight fit though which makes it a little difficult sometimes.

shamino wrote:

Sometimes I just melt the solder and work the new cap through without actually clearing the hole. It helps to add solder so you […]
Show full quote

Evert wrote:

Before I continue on my journey to nowhere, can anyone offer any advice on how to clear the remaining solder in the through holes? I only have solder wick (which was a disaster since I almost burnt through the trace) and a manual solder sucker. I'm going to leave it to try for the next 2-4 days and hopefully it will post when I install the new capacitors.

Sometimes I just melt the solder and work the new cap through without actually clearing the hole. It helps to add solder so you get better thermal contact.
Another method is to melt the solder and push a stainless steel pin into it. Solder won't stick to that, so after it cools you can twist it and remove, leaving a hole.
I've used a "safety pin", which I don't actually know what it's made out of, but solder doesn't seem to stick to it so it works. It's a tight fit though which makes it a little difficult sometimes.

Thanks for the advice! I'll give it a go.

I played around with the EP-3VBM+ board a little and it doesn't want to POST. The capacitors all look good on it, but they Tayeh and GSC so they're probably not. The CPU fan spins but nothing happens and there is no POST screen. When you plug an internal speaker into the PC_SPK header the same thing happens, but the CPU fan doesn't spin and there's no noise. I am aware that this could be a sign of bad capacitors or maybe there's something wrong with the BIOS chip. What else could cause this? I've tried res-eating the RAM, plugging in all the basics, I used various AGP and PCI display cards and it just won't POST.

Edit: Some more information

I hooked my multimeter up to the ATX IO connectors and sure enough there is power being supplied to the LEDs, the IDE connectors etc. Interesting enough, when you short the two leads of the multimeter on the pc_speaker connection the CPU fan stops spinning, just like it does when you attach the PC speaker.

Here are some photos of the EP-3VBM+ Ver 1.2 board:

Visually the Tayeh capacitors look okay, but it is showing symptoms of bad caps since it won't POST. The MOSFETs and other chips also look okay. I can't see any signs of burning or discoloration. To help anyone who has to deal with the motherboard, I've attached the latest BIOS I could find.

An update. Okay, my capacitors for the 3BXA arrived today and I will re-cap the board either tomorrow or on Thursday. I did some reading on the problems and it seems like it's probably one of the following:

- Bad capacitors
- Corrupted BIOS
- DOA CPU
or
- Lightning damage

Hopefully it's not the last one, because then I might as well chuck the board away. I decided to invest in a Universal EPROM Programmer since you can use that to flash BIOS chips and I bought a couple of empty Winbond W29C20C chips off eBay. The capacitors are basically the same as with the 3BXA. I also ordered 2x 800MHz Pentium III CPUs (100MHz FSB) from eBay (these are the cheapest, fastest and most compatible processors for both boards). If I get both of them to work, I'll probably end up using the mATX board and selling the 3BXA. mATX boards with ISA slots are extremely rare and I'd be able to pair a TNT2 / Rage Fury / Matrox G400 with 2x Voodoo 2 cards as well as a Yamaha YMF719 ISA card. I think it'll make a very good late 90s machine.

Evert wrote:

An update. Okay, my capacitors for the 3BXA arrived today and I will re-cap the board either tomorrow or on Thursday. I did some […]
Show full quote

An update. Okay, my capacitors for the 3BXA arrived today and I will re-cap the board either tomorrow or on Thursday. I did some reading on the problems and it seems like it's probably one of the following:

- Bad capacitors
- Corrupted BIOS
- DOA CPU
or
- Lightning damage

Hopefully it's not the last one, because then I might as well chuck the board away. I decided to invest in a Universal EPROM Programmer since you can use that to flash BIOS chips and I bought a couple of empty Winbond W29C20C chips off eBay. The capacitors are basically the same as with the 3BXA. I also ordered 2x 800MHz Pentium III CPUs (100MHz FSB) from eBay (these are the cheapest, fastest and most compatible processors for both boards). If I get both of them to work, I'll probably end up using the mATX board and selling the 3BXA. mATX boards with ISA slots are extremely rare and I'd be able to pair a TNT2 / Rage Fury / Matrox G400 with 2x Voodoo 2 cards as well as a Yamaha YMF719 ISA card. I think it'll make a very good late 90s machine.

Do not trim down the leads on the new caps until you see that the boad works, that way it will be easier to remove and reuse them. Just put some electrical tape on them to avoid shorts 😀.

Skyscraper wrote:

Evert wrote:

An update. Okay, my capacitors for the 3BXA arrived today and I will re-cap the board either tomorrow or on Thursday. I did some […]
Show full quote

An update. Okay, my capacitors for the 3BXA arrived today and I will re-cap the board either tomorrow or on Thursday. I did some reading on the problems and it seems like it's probably one of the following:

- Bad capacitors
- Corrupted BIOS
- DOA CPU
or
- Lightning damage

Hopefully it's not the last one, because then I might as well chuck the board away. I decided to invest in a Universal EPROM Programmer since you can use that to flash BIOS chips and I bought a couple of empty Winbond W29C20C chips off eBay. The capacitors are basically the same as with the 3BXA. I also ordered 2x 800MHz Pentium III CPUs (100MHz FSB) from eBay (these are the cheapest, fastest and most compatible processors for both boards). If I get both of them to work, I'll probably end up using the mATX board and selling the 3BXA. mATX boards with ISA slots are extremely rare and I'd be able to pair a TNT2 / Rage Fury / Matrox G400 with 2x Voodoo 2 cards as well as a Yamaha YMF719 ISA card. I think it'll make a very good late 90s machine.

Do not trim down the leads on the new caps until you see that the boad works, that way it will be easier to remove and reuse them. Just put some electrical tape on them to avoid shorts 😀.

Good tip! Thanks.

I recapped the EP-3BXA today (took 3 hours and at some points I thought the board was a goner), but I'm very happy to say that it POSTS. Okay, after just running it for a few minutes I found the cause of the discoloration: the VRMs. Holy crap do they get hot! Should I invest in a heatsink or something?

Evert wrote:

I recapped the EP-3BXA today (took 3 hours and at some points I thought the board was a goner), but I'm very happy to say that it POSTS. Okay, after just running it for a few minutes I found the cause of the discoloration: the VRMs. Holy crap do they get hot! Should I invest in a heatsink or something?

Generally speaking I'd say it's not necessary. MOSFETs do run hot, but it was okay at least by the standards of it's intended operating life back when it was made.
However, if you look at this hardware from a preservationist point of view, and want to help this board to last forever and ever 😀 then cooling the VRM area would probably aid in that effort.

Failing capacitors can put stress on the MOSFETs, so there's an outside chance they aren't healthy, but most likely they're fine.

Thanks! Looks like in my over-enthusiasm to recap the board I burnt the sides of two of the capacitors. Do I need to replace them or will it be okay?

Evert wrote:

Thanks! Looks like in my over-enthusiasm to recap the board I burnt the sides of two of the capacitors. Do I need to replace the […]
Show full quote

Thanks! Looks like in my over-enthusiasm to recap the board I burnt the sides of two of the capacitors. Do I need to replace them or will it be okay?

It shouldnt matter at all.