keenmaster486 wrote:

OK, here's a picture of that Socket 7 board:
EDIT: When you zoom in the bad component is near the lower right... 😒

That does look really strange, take pictures from more angles. From what I can see the VRM has moved out of position but I can not explian how that could happen. Perhaps that VRM never has been soldered to the board and the previous ower just glued it there to solder it to the board correctly later.

You really need to recap that motherboard if the strange VRM mounting turns out to be as intended or fixable, every single cap is bloated.

Dude, AMD Athlon CPUs are socket A (462), NOT socket 7. The CPU you had on that is probably and AMD K6-2, not an early Athlon.

The motherboard looks like a DFI super-7 MVP3 chipset board. This changes thing. Socket 7 CPUs have an integrated heatspreder witch prevents damage to the CPU if no heatsink is installed (provided you din't let it run for more then a few minutes w/o a heatsink).

The board in the picture is probably fixable as long as the solder pads for the mosfet (black thing hanging off the board) are not scorched or damaged - witch means you can try soldering it back on or replacing it.

kanecvr wrote:

Dude, AMD Athlon CPUs are socket A (462), NOT socket 7. The CPU you had on that is probably and AMD K6-2, not an early Athlon.

The motherboard looks like a DFI super-7 MVP3 chipset board. This changes thing. Socket 7 CPUs have an integrated heatspreder witch prevents damage to the CPU if no heatsink is installed (provided you din't let it run for more then a few minutes w/o a heatsink).

The board in the picture is probably fixable as long as the solder pads for the mosfet (black thing hanging off the board) are not scorched or damaged - witch means you can try soldering it back on or replacing it.

If you read through all posts I think you will find that he has more than one motherboard, one Socket-A board and at least two Socket-7 boards. This is at least the picture I got but Im not reading through the whole thread again to make sure. 😀

Skyscraper wrote:

That does look really strange, take pictures from more angles. From what I can see the VRM has moved out of position but I can not explian how that could happen. Perhaps that VRM never has been soldered to the board and the previous ower just glued it there to solder it to the board correctly later.

Yeah, I couldn't figure out how that would happen unless it was a malfunction at the factory or something...

Skyscraper wrote:

You really need to recap that motherboard if the strange VRM mounting turns out to be as intended or fixable, every single cap is bloated.

I actually did replace all of the caps, I guess I forgot to mention that. That picture I uploaded was an old one.
Here are some pictures at different angles:

And there was one more thing which I forgot to mention which might be a problem: when I was soldering one of the capacitors two of the traces got dislocated. They look like they're there but one of them *might* be touching the solder pad on the capacitor... You can't really see very well in the picture but I did my best:

kanecvr wrote:

Dude, AMD Athlon CPUs are socket A (462), NOT socket 7. The CPU you had on that is probably and AMD K6-2, not an early Athlon.

Yes. I did find that out, after I bought the first Socket A MB I got. This board is not the one I was having trouble with in the OP, that was a K7T Turbo2 Socket A board, and it did have an Athlon in it. This Socket 7 board didn't come with a CPU, but coincidentally I actually do have a K6-II I could put in it! Although I'll probably just end up using my Pentium/100. It is nice to know it's a Super 7 however, I didn't know that.

kanecvr wrote:

Socket 7 CPUs have an integrated heatspreder witch prevents damage to the CPU if no heatsink is installed (provided you din't let it run for more then a few minutes w/o a heatsink).

Whew, nice to know. Killing that Athlon has scarred me for life, I think. 😉 I'll never run a CPU without proper cooling again!

kanecvr wrote:

The board in the picture is probably fixable as long as the solder pads for the mosfet (black thing hanging off the board) are not scorched or damaged - witch means you can try soldering it back on or replacing it.

OK, that's good. This is the one I was really hoping to make work, too. On a side note, why is the middle pin on the regulator snipped off? I've seen that time and time again on boards like this and I've never been able to figure out why that is.