How about Prime95?? I know its not exactly a motherboard test but it does run the CPU at full cycles hence the caps around the CPU socket are working hard to provide voltage. Download like below:

http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=205

I find prime to limited. Best is to play a few games. That stresses all sorts of components. But nothing beats long-term use and noticing little things like freezes or crashes. Go with a power hungry CPU as well, fill all RAM slots and other slots. That should stress the system well enough 😀

For 486 and early Pentium systems Quake is a great game to crash your system if it isn't stable. Doom, 3DBench and all the other have higher tolerance levels, but then comes Quake and it fails pretty quickly.

Thanks, I'll download it and give it a try. I've read about Prime 95 but never used it before. Wanted to benchmark the cpu anyway (P3 1.4ghz Tully) so this may just kill 2 birds with 1 stone.

Unfortunately I've never heard of any motherboard specific test software before. Just cpu and gpu benchmarking software.

Mau1wurf and Vetz, just noticed your replies. The rig is featured in this thread in case you guys were curious as to the hardware side of things. Only thing different is that now it's running a PNY TI4600 in place of the Voodoo 3000 and the coolermaster cooler is now in the bin. Replaced by a Dynatron Microfin heatsink with a Noctua 60mm fan.

My latest Windows 98 Pentium 3 rig.

I will install Quake 3 and run it at max settings then play for an hour or two to see if there are any crashes/freezes etc

I agree with using a game to see if it drops. If you want to stress test the system, just load in the UBCD and look at some of the various benchmark/test apps it can run, like CPU Burn, memtest, etc and see if it can run those stable for a long period of time (make sure your cooling is up to the task of long-term stress/load testing before you undertake this with any application).

Ok, decided to recap the whole board. I'm anal like that sometimes... First fired it up with just the cpu, ram and graphics card to see if it would boot and that worked fine. Next I connected everything up outside of the case as pictured so I could test its stability being fully loaded. Ran Prime95 for 24 hours straight without a single fail which was great. Next fired up 3D Mark 01 after some difficulty with drivers and that went through fine as well. Last test was quake 3 which didn't have any issues. I think it's safe to say that things went well 😀 ...I hope!

Replacing the rest of the caps was a good idea. That board should be happier now.
Failing caps can short circuit and sometimes ruin the board, so once this type of problem is known it's better to replace the rest of them before it gets out of hand. If a few of them had bulged, the others probably weren't much better. They don't always bulge, and if they do, it only happens after they've already been in a failed state.

I'm a little late suggesting this, but I like to do stress tests with the FSB overclocked slightly beyond how you intend to run it. This way you know you aren't on the ragged edge of instability. It also helps account for the fact that no stress test will be perfect, and that things may degrade slightly over the long term.

Even many older motherboards have a 3% overclock setting, and I suspect this is why, or at least, this is what I think it's good for. Any reliable machine should be able to pass stress tests while everything is overclocked by 3%.

Overclocking slightly is a good idea for testing purposes. I don't normally overclock old hardware as there's usually no reason to given how cheap CPUs and graphics cards are these days. Might give it a shot soon though. Thanks for the suggestion.