Hello everyone,

I'm new here but have watched many topics since a long time 😀 Last week I got donated an Asus A7V8X motherboard + Athlon XP 2000+ which had obvious leaking capacitors, the lot had been sitting in a box for about 10 years. I still powered it on and as the battery was dead it went to the BIOS where the CPU configuration defaulted to 12.5x100 and I could boot in DOS and update the BIOS. But as soon as I bump the CPU speed to 12.5x133 (the XP2000+ real frequency) the machine sort of starts up, then the CPU fan rpm moves around quite a bit and the system shuts itself down by itself. As soon as you go back to 12.5x100, it's stable.

My theory is that the leaky capacitors can't handle the power draw at higher speeds, so I unsoldered them and cleaned all the gunk that leaked on the mainboard. Before inserting new ones I took my multimeter and to my surprise there is continuity between the legs of all the 4 capacitors I removed (between all the legs actually). So I'm a bit puzzeled of what is happening here..it looks like a short somewhere?

Any advice would be welcome.