A rather large stack of old, non posting boards from the cap plague era were looked at this year. The daunting task of buying the correct capacitor replacements and learning the ropes of the soldering iron has seemingly paid off. Most of the work has been successful with a very good % of boards coming back to life & stress tested. Motherboard brands like MSI, Soltek, ABit, Epox, Albatron have been done. Some boards partially replaced, others every single one.

This is possibly the most common circa 2001-02 P4 board sold on a very tight budget. With this board, all caps replaced were those that weren't the VRM caps. I was running a bit short of those but the ones bulging were everywhere else. The one on top was kinked by a rough user who smashed the CPU retention bracket taking off the heatsink. I didn't give it much hope to work considering the state of it & only replaced the visibly broken ones. The underside of the board is good. All legs are secure.

Serious Sam 1 ran for many hours without a hitch. Ran a few 3DMarks etc. Other than being a slow 'A' board, it's going well.