I have this QDI PlatiniX 4X Socket 423 motherboard I bought NOS a few years ago. Normally the P4 platform is of no interest to me, but I find the oddness of the short-lived S423 + RDRAM combo quite fascinating. Anyway, this board works just fine with a 1.9GHz Willamette and 512MB of PC800 RDRAM (2 RIMMs + 2 C-RIMM "terminators"), but I noticed that after running for a few hours all the non-Japanese capacitors near the regulators around the memory area had leaked their guts. Since the board is from 2001, it is a potential victim of the capacitor plague, so I did a full recap (even though the larger Rubycon caps all seemed to be OK). I used all quality stuff, mostly Rubycon+Panasonic.

The recap went fine, and the board still works perfectly. However, I noticed that the 4 regulators on the same area where the old caps leaked run extremely hot (red rectangle in the photo), I cannot keep my finger more than a few seconds without burning. Now, these 4 chips are Fairchild 1084MC LDO voltage regulators, so I'm not concerned with those running hot since they can take up to 150C. However, the caps in the surroundings get as hot as the regulators, which may explain why the original ones leaked after such a short period.

So, aside from the terrible design by QDI, I'm looking for suggestions on how to handle this, as I don't want the new caps to be cooked. The area is difficult to reach with active cooling, even though I have good airflow in the case, and I don't think a passive heatsink on the regulators would be of much help. I was considering replacing the regulators with more modern equivalents that run cooler, does anyone know what replacement parts I could use here?