Definitely replace all of the caps that are of the same brand as the one that is visibly going bad. If one is bad, they probably all are.

I have no experience with this particular board, so I can't say whether the VRM is likely to be bad or not, but there's no way of knowing until the bad caps are replaced at least.

If you want to save a bit of work just for testing, replace any that are visibly bad first and see if that brings it back to life. Most likely it won't work well until all plagued caps are gone though, and this board is definitely from the middle of the cap plague era. If you replace some and it does start working, I would still replace them all. It's possible that you'd be doing damage to the VRM or other components by running it with some bad caps.

Also, welcome to VOGONS. 😀

Hello,

only that cap on the board looks visibly bad and has been leaking on the top for a while. but from what i can see there isnt any leaking under the cap, ill have a look around the board completely to see if there are any other bad caps in need of replacing, but from what i can remember (not at home atm) that one cap was the only bad one i could see.

thanks.

thegeforce wrote on Yesterday, 05:51:

Hello,

only that cap on the board looks visibly bad and has been leaking on the top for a while. but from what i can see there isnt any leaking under the cap, ill have a look around the board completely to see if there are any other bad caps in need of replacing, but from what i can remember (not at home atm) that one cap was the only bad one i could see.

thanks.

Like I said, if one is visibly bad then you will want to replace all caps of that type on the board because they are very likely all bad, regardless of how they look. Long before a capacitor leaks or even bulges, a bad cap from the plague era (roughly 1999-2007) will be so far out of spec (ESR, capacitance, etc.) that it can cause serious problems.

It's a common misconception that a bad capacitor has to have visible signs of being bad. In fact, tiny aluminum electrolytic caps (usually found in clusters around the PCI slots, rather than the large ones near the CPU) generally do not leak or swell, and yet can cause problems just like the larger ones.

I would not just go around replacing all caps on every board for no reason, but if one is visibly leaking\bulged and it is of a not so great brand name, you can be certain that the other caps of that type came from the same batch with the defective electrolyte. Often times heat can accelerate the deterioration of a capacitor, so it is common for some to be more visibly bad than others simply because they were exposed to more heat.

I have two of these motherboards. Both were dead when I got them and both started working again after replacing the single tall capacitor between the RAM slots and the SATA ports.