Great job, congratulations! 😁

i did something similar on an athlon xp board a short while ago. The caps looked exactly the same as on your board so I replaced all. The thing is, before i replaced the caps, the motherboard worked... somewhat. It would just have random freezes, then it got to the point where it would not even detect the processor. After i replaced all the caps... nothing changed. I'm pretty decent with the soldering iron so i don't think that was the problem. The board was simply beyond repairing. Something else other than caps might have been damaged.

I'm glad yours turned out ok! Did you test it before you replaced the caps?

yes i did, and it would post. But it was about as stable as a skateboard in a canoe. 😜

Cool, I think that makes a total of two of us on these boards with Slot A machines. Common, they ain't. 😁

Weird about the bad caps, I thought Slot A platform pretty well pre-dated that whole issue. Oh, and you call that 'grody'? That's nothing... the entire bottom half of my K7V was covered in (what appeared to be/what I'm hoping was) old dried-out Coke. All over the board, in the PCI slots, everywhere. I did the same bit with a toothbrush and dish soap, got it looking good as new.

My Abit BF6 which is slightly older than the KA7 had bad caps. Replaced them myself as well. I'm thinking the bad caps thing started somewhere around '97-98.

I'd like a Slot A system with one of those 1 GHz Athlons with the gimpy 1/3 speed L2. 😉 But they cost too much and I know the boards have AGP issues so the motivation fades whenever I think too much about it.

I'm actually in the market for a 1ghz athlon chip. Both the pluto? and the thunderbird chips. I have a 950 and a 600 but my OCD DEMANDS that I get both 1ghz chips.

One thing I'd really like to get for mine is one of the "goldfinger" overclocking devices. A proper Slot A system isn't really complete without one, IMO. Unfortunately, those things seem to be quite impossible to find these days.

Great work! I had a MSI Slot A board with a 750MHz Athlon. Caps went south and gave it away. IIRC it was the Irongate chipset which wasn't so great anyways but I remember XP would fly on that little setup.

I think it was more like 98+ and around the time of Slot A and Socket 370. I haven't really seen any Slot 1 with puffy caps.

$30 seems a bit steep for caps, have compared prices at digi-key or bdent? I've used B&D caps with good success. I think orders have to be atleast $15 minimum.

There were Slot 1 boards made in '99 and '00. Anything from Abit during those years usually has bad caps. My Slot 1 BF6 sure did.

I got a cap pack from www.badcaps.net. He thought it was great that people are refurbing the old boards.

Slot A...I rarely ever see them. Good find! 😉

I've got a new in box DFI slotA mobo but I haven't done anything with it yet. Got an 850 athlon to throw in it.

I've had to replace caps on a lot of boards, especially on boards from the first few years of last decade, but recently I had to replace some tantalum caps on a 286 board built in 1988. I started it up outside the case and a big flare/arc came up at my face as the cap blew.... Scared the crap out if me 😜 soldered on a new one and it's all good now 😀

DonutKing wrote:

but recently I had to replace some tantalum caps on a 286 board built in 1988. I started it up outside the case and a big flare/arc came up at my face as the cap blew.... Scared the crap out if me 😜 soldered on a new one and it's all good now 😀

I've had that happen too with my ASUS SP3, it was like a fire cracker going off!!!!!