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Can I use higher capacity capacitors on this board?

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First post, by byte_76

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I was recently given this board for free.
I haven't tested it yet because the caps are in bad condition.

I have replacements for all the green caps near the CPU but the black caps that are scattered across the board are 1000uf 6.3V and I don't have any of those in stock at the moment.
I do have 1500uf 6.3V caps in a near identical package size.

Can I use the 1500uf caps or would that likely be too far out of spec?

Reply 1 of 1, by DaveDDS

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in many cases in a computer, caps are used for filtering/noise reduction. In these cases bigger is almost always better.

I'm pretty sure this would be the case for larger caps "scattered all over".

A couple cases where it can matter would be as part of an oscillating circuit of some sort - this would change the frequency... but
most everything oscillator a PC is crystal controlled and caps as part of that circuit would be very small.

Another case where a cap is often used is to time the initial reset - again this would be smaller, and the effect of
"too big" would be delayed reset (which can cause problems if other things expect a device to be operational by
a certain time in the reset cycle).

I'd probably "go for it" - I don't think you could damage things with larger caps - but I've never actually done
this in a PC - perhaps someone else has better information/experience?

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

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