VOGONS


First post, by Xenphor

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Since Pentium 4 era boards have been recommend as good Windows 98 machines, I bought 3 Asrock 775i65g boards about a year ago when Newegg was still selling them new.

I haven't really had any issues with the board (other than sometimes it will not detect boot media for some reason; perhaps a SATA/IDE compatibility thing?), but since the topic of capacitors going bad usually comes up when talking about old hardware, and since this period of time is notorious for bad capacitors, I took a look at the ones on the Asrock board, and there are 4 Chemi-con KZG series caps by the CPU socket that apparently are known to fail 100%. Right by those are OST RLX (questionable quality?), and the rest of the board seems to be populated by Samxon (not sure quality?).

Assuming the boards were sitting in a Newegg warehouse until now, and I only ever plan to use them infrequently for retro pc things (only really used 1 so far; others I just booted once to make sure they actually worked), how necessary would it be to replace at least the KZG caps? Physically they appear fine if that matters at all.

I have never soldered before, and probably will eventually have to learn (since I also have 2 Geforce 4s), but not sure how vital it is right now.

edit: I guess I should mention that I'm not really stressing the components at all, since I have a pentium e5800 and geforce 4 running games mostly from the late 90s, but I've read that KZG caps can go bad sitting idle.