Hey there,

i recently found a Lanner TF-586VM industrial motherboard. These boards usually sell for upwards of 200$ on ebay, but since some caps were bulging i convinced the guy to sell it to me for 20$. It arrived today, and as i was finishing assembling one more XT-IDE CF card i resolved to keep the soldring iron hot and do the job.

The caps that needed to be replaced were the VRM ones, with the usual norm values of 1000uf 6.3V. As soon as i bought the board i ordered these babies from mouser:

I got 100 of them, since it was cheaper than getting 50, so i decided to get enough caps to recap my retro boards.

Now here's the board before it arrived:

Yeah, clearly bulging on those black caps. The green ones were Sanyo branded and their appearance looked fine, but for piece of mind i decided to get them all off to replace with my brand new ultra low ESR Nichicon polymers:

Yeah not a perfect job in terms of allignment, but i don't really care. I think i did well recapping it. I don't know how people recap their boards but its really important to let the solder flow properly. I like to wiggle the cap gently while i reheat the solder to allow it to flow nicely into the hole. This board is a high quality 6 layer PCB (according to the manual, and i could feel its sturdiness) so i wanted to make sure the solder was getting in nicely and making all the necessary contacts.

The board posted absolutely fine at first try. Needless to say i'm gonna use this board on my Socket 7 build. With 6 ISA slots i have enough ISA space for lots of sound cards.

The board includes an S3 Virge 375 graphics chip with integrated RAMDAC. Unfortunately the VGA connector is missing from the PCB and there's only a header, but i have no cable. I already ordered some PCB mount VGA headers and since my iron was still hot i did this:

It's ready and willing to receive a VGA connector in there!

In the meantime i tested it with my S3 Trio 64 card and it works great. As soon as that VGA connector is there i can spare the shared ISA/PCI slot. So the dedicated PCI slot will be taken by the network card and the shared ISA/PCI will be taken by some other sound card.

I also dumped the BIOS on this board as i couldn't find an image anywhere else. I already sent Jan Steunebrink an email to check the BIOS for AMD K6+ BIOS compatibility and needed patching.

This board has another feature i like. The jumper headers are really well implemented so for the FSB i'm gonna wire a cable with a push button so i can switch between 50MHz FSB (for underclocking the machine) and 66Mhz or 83MHz for higher speeds. This way i can run the K6 at 400 or 500Mhz. I'll leave the multiplier jumpers alone since the k6+ can be controlled by software.

As soon as this board is all ready i'll update my main system thread.