The thing about "worthless" hardware is, one tends not to think much of it and thus more likely to try "experiments" on it (be it hardware mods or silly software / firmware) and/or enjoy it without caring if it'll break or not. At least from personal experience, I can tell you that I've put far more hours gaming on cheap crap hardware than I have on nice machines.

douglar wrote on 2024-05-01, 20:27:

And if you should ever want to recap a valuable board some day, you will have wished that you built up your skills on those 478 boards that needed your attention.

+1

Always best to start / practice on the "easy" fixes first, even if it's on "worthless" items, before moving onto more expensive stuff.

I understand all these points but OP seemed reluctant to change caps so it was obvious that he didn't want to spend money to save a mediocre chinosium board. It's filled with g-luxon(teapo/jamicon) caps so he'd have to spend like $40 to replace all of those with decent Rubycons or Panasonics. He should just throw that board in the trash and buy a quality brand.

Chinese caps are fine for a junk board you care only just enough about to do a few solder joints.

Mandrew wrote on 2024-05-02, 20:09:

It's filled with g-luxon(teapo/jamicon) caps so he'd have to spend like $40 to replace all of those with decent Rubycons or Panasonics.

No, it won't cost anywhere near that. Not even in Canadian/Australian/Singaporean dollars.

You're looking at $20 tops.

In most of NA, Digikey and Mouser can get you a small order shipped for about $10 or less (typically closer to $7).

Large 2200 uF or 3300 uF (6.3V) caps and 1500 uF (16V) caps tend to be the most expensive at around $1 a piece, typically. Buy 10 of them, and that usually drops to ~$0.50 - $0.70.
The smaller caps are usually along the lines of $0.30 to $0.50 each... but again, if you buy in multiples of 10, that drops to about $0.20 to 0.30 each. In regards to these, I usually like to get Rubycon ZLQ 6.3V 1200 uF, as these are often good enough to cover 820 uF, 1000 uF, 1200 uF, and 1500 uF (6.3V) caps on a motherboard (save for the CPU VRM on Pentium 4 class and newer boards, where ultra low-ESR caps would be a better fit.)
If you do all of the math from the above, you'll see that it costs typically no more than $20 - and that's from a reputable supplier! (And probably with a few spare caps leftover, which are always handy for other retro projects.) If you go the Ebay / Aliexpress route, you might be able to do this even cheaper, especially with NOS (new old stock) or leftoever production caps. For example, you can find genuine United Chemicon polymers (PSA and PSC series) with trimmed leads left over from productions for mere pennies (they usually come in quantities of 10+). With those and NOS caps, I can get a board recapped with quality Japanese caps for around $10-13.

Personally, I suggest staying away from Aliexpress, though, as it just takes too much time to find relevant listings and you never know if they caps you get will actually match the ones promised in the listing. With Ebay, results tend to be more organized and it's also easier to weed out the cheapo/ garbage sellers.

Mandrew wrote on 2024-05-02, 20:09:

He should just throw that board in the trash and buy a quality brand.

Yes, because quality boards with good caps from the mid-2000's are readily available everywhere.
:\