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Abit AN7 - missing capacitors

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First post, by Timecop1983

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Hello Vogons,

Recently I bought the Abit AN7 motherboard (I already own bunch of NF7s 😎 ). It cost me about $10 (shipping included) and it comes bundled with Palomino 1600+ (cooled by Arctic Cooling Copper Silent 3), 2x515 Kingston DDR400 plus the "blue" zalman (cooling the northbridge) and "yellow/gold" zalman (cooling the southbridge). No box and any other accessories (cables, io shield, cd-rom, etc.), but still it should be good deal. However, after I received the package I was confused and angry, because it seems that 3 of 4 capacitors near the CPU socket were missing! The previous owner stated that the mobo is "100% operational and tested". So I decided to run and stress test the mobo by my own. Suprisingly the machine is working fine and it's fully stable (even after overclocking the CPU!).

Please could someone explain me for what purpose are these missing capacitors? Is there any sense to try to solder in the missing capacitors?

Actual pictures plus some explanation of elements on the board...
http://imgur.com/a/A0f2P

Reply 1 of 4, by Jepael

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Timecop1983 wrote:

Please could someone explain me for what purpose are these missing capacitors? Is there any sense to try to solder in the missing capacitors?

To me they look like they are the VRM output capacitors, Vcore maybe. Maybe someone has started to change bulging caps and forgot about it. Compared to other AN7 pictures, there really is three caps missing, and they look like they are definitely been there and soldered out. The thing is, I think the missing caps should be in parallel with the other caps, and with the rest of the capacitors missing, the ripple voltage is higher because there is less capacitance and less caps result into higher ESR, and also the remaining caps have to then withstand higher ripple current as well so they heat up more and wear out faster. I am surprised it works at all, sometimes the regulation feedback does not work unless there is large enough amount of capacitance there.

Definitely solder the missing capacitors before continuing to use it.

Reply 3 of 4, by SSTV2

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Those caps are CPUs buck converters filter caps, system would boot with at least 1 cap soldered in, but you can expect some instability later. Total capacitance should be around 8-15k uF, the more the better, it's up to you now.

Reply 4 of 4, by Timecop1983

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kanecvr wrote:

The missing caps are 2200uf 6.3v - ya need to get a few and solder them on - it's not safe to use the board like that.

Original capacitors were 3300uf 6.3v and I already bought these, because I also own NF7 with broken capacitors, so I will fix these two motherboards.

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