Bad Capacitors A7N8X Deluxe

[Lascar]

I just noticed this for the first time with 4 caps on my a7n8x deluxe. I think there's still a pretty good possibility that this board will stay functional for a while considering Tech_Cowboy's pictures.

It's getting time to upgrade this machine anyway and that goes for anything that bad voltage regulation would ruin so yeah, thanks for the great thread, just googled 'a7n8x capacitor leak' and this was the first result.

[dluther]

First, I want to thank everyone who's posted on this forum -- lots of good and useful information.

As a musician, I'm building a dedicated DAW from my old A7N8X-E and XP3200+, but when I was cleaning it I also noticed all eight of the VRM caps were pooched out on top and leaking electrolyte. Based on the info from this forum (thanks Gibby), I bought the recommended replacement caps from badcaps.net for about $15 including shipping. I actually bought one extra "just in case".

The replacement process was a bit of a trick. I had no problems removing the old caps, but one of the lead holes was very stubborn shedding the solder -- so after three days on and off of sucking and blowing with my desoldering pump, wicking with the solder braid, and trying to force a hot lead through, I eventually decided it was time to drill. Had to find a suitable bit, so I went to Radio Shack to see if they had a PCB drill bit, which they didn't. I ended up at Lowe's and found a precision drill bit set for my Dremel ($9), so I bought that. When I got home I discovered there's no way to chuck those tiny bits with the standard Dremel collet, so I called the Dremel consumer hotline and was told I need to buy a Dremel chuck, which would chuck down to the 1/32" bit I used. So back to Lowe's I went, picked up the "superchuck" (another $9) and it worked great. So I drilled out the offending hole, and it went through like a hot knife through butter. It worked so well I just went ahead and drilled all the remaining lead holes.

Soldering was a snap, and when I hooked up my new power supply and video card, I got the green LED and the "beep" -- the Nvidia POST screen and it's back in action!

Anyway, I wanted to thank you folks for the resource. This info is two years old, and I'm glad it was here.

Now I'm off to assemble my audio workstation. I love this motherboard because the SoundStorm audio on the Nforce2 has ASIO drivers that can deliver 48KHz down to 3ms, which anything less than 10ms is as close to realtime as you can get.