Bought this Abit VL6 socket 370 motherboard super cheap from an eBay auction, described as "Not working". The seller noted it immediately powering off, suggesting a short.
The attachment IMG20250809111849.jpg is no longer available
I checked the ATX header for shorts, but couldn't find any with a multimeter. There were 5 capacitors absolutely blown, and a few more of the same values bulging. I replaced all of these types (2200uf 6.3v and 1500uf) with odd spares I had from a mix of Rubycon, Nichicon and Panasonic. Seems to boot fine now!
The attachment IMG20250809111846.jpg is no longer available
There are a lot of 1000uf 10v capacitors of the same green type as the bad ones. Worth replacing those?
The cooler I have on the P3 733 (also cheap from eBay) is a random one I think was left from a Socket 7 board. It's really noisy! Should I get a bigger/better cooler for this relatively fast P3? (Is the Startech one any good? The heatsink part looks a lot like this one) I've left the soft configuration on 300Mhz for now to keep the temp down.
I gather the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset isn't the best, but it finally gives me a Socket 370 board with ISA - that seems really hard to find now!
I noticed the audio chip is a Yamaha YMF-752. Is that just a generic AC97 chip that happened to be made by Yamaha?