cyclone3d wrote on 2026-06-09, 16:26:

The capacitors look fine but they may still be in need of replacement. With new caps and socket pin mod, you should be able to get up to 2.3-2.4 Ghz.

If it runs fine for what you are using it for, don't worry about it. Most of those large caps are for CPU and maybe RAM.

I am a little worried that I will kill the board if I recap it. There are a lot of caps.

As for upgrading the CPU, it is tempting. But, TBH, 1.4Ghz Athlon with Geforce 2 (or Geforce MX 460 - i haven't decided yet) should be plenty for a DirectX 7 machine. I will be building a P4 with Geforce 4600 for DirectX 8.

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-06-09, 16:26:

The last KT7A board I got that was NOs, the first time I powered it up, most of the caps exploded. Made me jump and there was capacitor paper all over the place.

Yeah, that would scare the life out of me too. Did it work again after a recap?

Yep, it worked fine after a recap.

I recapped a different board the other day, an ASUS A7N8X v2.0. one of the cap holes decided to let the pads go. Had another of the same board and tested and found out that the caps are in parallel so I was able to just jumper to one of the other caps in and it is working fine as well.

I really, really hate lead-free solder.

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-06-09, 16:26:

The capacitors look fine but they may still be in need of replacement. With new caps and socket pin mod, you should be able to get up to 2.3-2.4 Ghz.

If it runs fine for what you are using it for, don't worry about it. Most of those large caps are for CPU and maybe RAM.

The last KT7A board I got that was NOs, the first time I powered it up, most of the caps exploded. Made me jump and there was capacitor paper all over the place.

Just out of curiosity, do you know what brand\series\color the caps were that popped? I have somehow not had this happen to any boards... yet.

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-06-10, 02:22:

I really, really hate lead-free solder.

Hi,

As I live in Hungary which is part of the EU and under the RoHS directive(As I like to call it in Hungarian the "Rossz Direktiva"(I know this is an English language forum, but I just had to make this joke 😁), I don't know what politician though that people are licking PCBs or something similar, it is a time when a good basic idea(Restricting hazardous materials) collided with the physical reality(there are no good substitute for leaded solder, all lead-free solders are inferior)) I cannot agree more, last time I wanted to buy leaded solder (Standard Sn 60/Pb 40) they asked what's my profession is or if I work for a company doing hardware repair, as they are only selling to those who are part of the repair industry. I'm starting to get out of my stock of leaded solder. I have a quality temperature controlled soldering station but Sn100NI is not really a good substitute and SAC305 is very expensive for a solder (Both of them are higher temperature than proper solder containing Pb, but at least SAC305 flows well when using the proper temperature for it.).