Call me sad if you like but I took so much joy when you fitted those moderm smd caps. The fact they looked right at home on the old board made my day. Thanks.
The capacitor method was ingenious. Then you showed your method to restore the rear ports and I actually shouted "you f...... genius" at my screen! I'll be using those both in the future.
FWIW at least at 150pf Kyocera has parts at 9.5mm and 3.5mm lead spacing that are radial... so no need to torture SMD caps unless that's just cheaper (which it probably is ironically).
@@NullReference119 Unfortunately the only option still made for these are much larger. They could be bodged on but would look really ugly and not allow for large heat sinks
Such fancy desoldering. I remember seeing a friend of mine do capacitor replacement about 20 years back on a low-end Soltek Socket 370 motherboard. He just balanced the board on his lap and using just a well worn regular soldering iron proudly made somewhere in the Soviet Union with a tip about the size of a pencil eraser he simply heated up the legs of each cap and plucked them out by hand, then shoved in new ones as replacements. Was very very fast work and that board lived for very many happy years after!
I used to run Falcon 4 on Win2K and dual 466's for the SMP - a year or two later I upgraded to a Duron 800 system and it left the BP6 in the dust! Things changed fast in that era.
Nice hack, but I recommend checking for Aluminium-Polymer capacitors. They are available in the mixed case, i.e. SMD case but through-hole legs. They are double the price compared to Aluminium Electrolytic but also have half the series resistance. That makes them perfect for the point of load supports around the CPU. Example: KEMET A750KS158M0JAAE014
Easily the best BP6 capacitor video on UA-cam! I'll add a few comments from my own experience with refurbishing one of these boards in case it helps someone else out. I swear good info is hard to find on these things! I re-capped my BP6 board with polymer caps about a year and a half ago. It's totally possible provided you keep to the 8mm diameter required. Many of the larger uf poly caps come in 10mm diameter by default, but if you look hard enough, 8mm is available. The issue is that the 8mm caps are ridiculously tall though, and will absolutely cause issue with 'orb' style heat syncs. My solution to this was to simply not use orbs. Turns out that AMD "Socket A" coolers are effectively identical in just about every dimension, and can easily be mounted to Socket 370 boards. They fit 100% perfectly and do not interfere with the capacitors at all. What's better yet is the brand new coolers I found had 6cm fans, which meant I could easily upgrade them to Noctuas for silent operation. I don't own a heater like this, so I did the entire job on a wooden work bench with a soldering iron and de-soldering gun. For stubborn ground-planes I found it easiest to just heat the leg up and pull it out, and then use a 0.75mm PCB drill bit to literally just drill out the remaining solder. It sounds like a violent technique, but I'd argue the risks are equally as high as accidentally melting or discoloring something with too much heat. It worked like an absolute charm for me, and after a day of work my BP6 has been rock solid since, running two 360mhz units at 550 all day long I also replaced the North bridge heat sync with a bigger one, and added a 40mm Noctua fan on that too. And of course I added thermal paste, since the original famously has none! Such SMD capacitor hacking has been around in the Walkman community for a while, since many of the teeny-tiny caps required for them are long obsolete, and thus it's the only feasible option! Glad to see people are now able to use it on PCs too
I used to sometimes, when I did not had the proper values, solder smd capacitors like you did. However, I never tought to file or thin theirs legs, they fitted just fine. The board also look better with those caps.
Gotta love the BP6! Nice job saving this one! I remember destroying mine from a bad heatsink install and being totally gutted (well before I knew how to do trace repair).
I had a BP6 with 2 Celeron 433 running at 490, a Voodoo 3, 256 Mo ram and SCSI disk. Usually running Linux or FreeBSD. It was quite a beast in her time ... Caps started leaking just 3 or 4 years later, but easy to replace. I loved this board. Way too expensive now. Replaced by a dual Athlon XP 1800 modified as MP 1800.
That idea with the SMD caps is really clever! I would do that to all of them not just the CPU ones, they just look far more modern and secure... Very nice board, with many connectivity abilities! Cheers from Greece, Keep up, Jim
i have the same MB, found it at the scrapyard. no bulged or leaky caps, they look fine, but the board is dead, no post no nothing. i keep it as a treasure, it sure is :) great repair!
Thanks! I can pretty much guarantee bad caps are preventing your board from booting. This board was completely dead but only showed minimal damage to one of the caps
I had multiple machines with BE6 and such and the same era. All failed this way, no visible damage but recap was needed. Now it is fun, but I had like 15 machines dying after around 1 year of office use…
21:17 “Period correct graphics card” I built mine around 2000 as a companion to my Asus P2B PIII system from early 1999. It was mostly used with hand-me-downs from my PIII including Diamond Monster Fusion Z100 (3Dfx Banshee) and Voodoo 3 3000 AGP, but it ended up with a its own GeForce 2 GTS-V before I had moved on. It also got some limited use (testing) with a GeForce 3 from my first Pentium 4 system. It was perfect for GL Quake, Quake II, Unreal, Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament, and so much more from the late ‘90s and early 2000s. nVidia was my go-to for SMP gaming.
Back in the times i could do an average mainboard recap in maybe 15mins. Pre-cut and flux the new caps, mount the board vertically and then use a wide tip with some solder on it to heat both pins at the same time, pull out the old cap and push in the new one without moving the iron away, if needed add some more solder, go to next cap. No preheat or desoldering/clearing needed.
Love the inclusion of the cows every time the desoldering station moos lol. Awesome capacitor hack btw, I've thought of doing something similar for many projects, especially handheld game consoles.
That's a fantastic little hack, and a great repair as well. And I love the Flatron monitor! I have its bigger brother, the 915FT Plus; they are magnificent units.
I got mine from a friend who got it from a friend who found it locally... in a different country. It's been around, but I use it as my main monitor. Needs some chassis work, however.
I'm looking forward to the dual Socket 370 shenanigans :) I built a dual Slot 1 system during the weekend based around a Gigabyte GA-6BXDS board with two Pentium IIIs clocked at 600 MHz :)
I've polymodded a few motherboards ... generally of the athlon XP variety where the ultra-low ESR caps are simply not made anymore. They look pretty cool when done.
I've still got a bp6 with dual 366's OCed to 550 with a voodoo 5 5500 I put in a ton of hours with windows 2000 workstation running linux, windows 2000 and windows 98. It was a hoss when I put it together back in the day it started with a matrox agp for 2d and two 12mb voodoo2 cards that served me well. It took quite a bit of searching to get two 366's to handle the OC and I paid a small fortune for the voodoo card at launch, never be a brand loyalist kids. I stuck with that dog until I got a GeForce 3. Sadly, it does suffer from cap bloat now and the 5500 has some bad ram too but I won't let them go. Parkinson's has taken my fine motor skills so I'll never be able to fix them myself but I'll never let them go who knows maybe someday I'll find someone local who can get them back up and running.
I had one of these boards back in the day with twin Celeron 300As (overclocked by 50% to 450!) along with the those Golden Orbs. IIRC, I had to to file the one side to get them to fit with the caps. About a year in I did a few cap replacements that many recommended for stability. Originally I ran only OS/2 Warp on it. But later I dual booted to Win 2K after I bought a Geforce2 MX along with Deus Ex which was one of the first games to be coded for SMP. I wish I would have kept that board.
Yeah, those Gorbs needed some filing to fit with the original caps. Now we've got these hacked SMD caps instead :) I'm going to try this board with OCd 300As in a new vid
I sometimes use these V-Chip capacitors in place of through hole like you did but only when I don't have a better fit in my stock. Bending the legs like that make them weaker (straighten them and bend them back once or twice and they will break), so it's still better to use through hole capacitor. Also, unlike what it may look like, the NCC MZR series is not solid polymer, it's a regular liquid electrolyte cap. Solid polymer may be more expensive than the regular liquid electrolyte caps, but they have better specs, especially much higher endurance rating. Modern motherboards typically use solid polymer caps except when cutting down cost as much as possible (i.e., OEM stuff). Solid polymer capacitors come with smaller dimensions. Also solid polymer caps generally have a lower ESR (and higher ripple current rating which is good) than the liquid electrolyte ones with similar specs, so it is generally advised to use slightly lower capacitance to avoid much higher inrush current that the voltage regulator may not like, here you could use 1000 µF or probably even 820 µF. In some cases you can also go down in voltage rating since the output voltage of this regulator shouldn't exceed 2 V, so you can use 4 V-rated caps for example that might come in an even smaller package. Apparently the caps for VCore are Tayeh LE series, 8×20 mm with 3.5 mm lead pitch, and the 6.3 V 1500 µF has an ESR of 20 mΩ (which I'm always a bit doubtful about for these low quality caps but let's go with it). So going for the same diameter of 8 mm with 3.5 mm lead pitch there's for example the Nichicon RL8 series, with the 6.3V 820µF cap at 8×8 mm and 9 mΩ ESR. People often call replacing liquid electrolytic caps with solid polymer a "polymod".
@@Epictronics1 To what piernov said I would just add that maybe you missed that whole category of caps based on your replies to some posts here? So notice how you are in the "Aluminium Organic Polymer Capacitors" category if you browse on Mouser when you reach that RL8 he recommended, in here are also old timers like the Sanyo SEPC (now owned by Panasonic) and some really amazing new caps like Chemi-Con PSG and PSC series with 15000h lifetime, well, the RL8 and SEPC was already crazy with 5000h compared to 2000h of the electrolytic MZR caps you put in, just keep in mind that going down a little in capacitance is usually not a problem, these caps where originally chosen for their low ESR, so seeing as the replacements are all much better we don't need such high capacitance in most cases, but it does depend on the switching frequency of the regulator, but if you only see 7 or 8 turns on the coils you can be sure the frequency is quite high and then bulk capacitance is not necessary, only low ESR, conversely if the switching frequency actually is quite low like in a ATX power supply decreasing ESR from the original caps could instead increase ripple because the circuit was not designed / tuned for that... As a final mention I see the Kemet A758 and A750 on that page: they are actually cheaper than the ones you bought so should be a nice recommendation too!
@@perhansson6718 Ok, thanks. I just quickly checked Kemet A758. It looks pretty good. It's 12mm tall so It might just about fit under the large cooler!
@@Epictronics1 You're welcome, also note the A758KK128M0EAAE014 for example: it is 8mm tall, only rated for 2.5v but that is no problem for the VCore of the CPU... Just be sure to not use it for the 5v or 12v input to the VRM ;)
I did something similar in production with bending leads. Can’t remember if the part becoming NLA was surface mount or through hole, but rather than redesign the board we just bent the leads to use the other version that was still available. I’m thinking it was a decent sized three pin voltage regulator or similar. I don’t know if the thicker leads would’ve been more resilient than the tiny leads that you did, but they’re probably fine too. It was approved by our customers engineers, our really smart mechanical engineers and our Test group. I’m thinking they may have done a couple shake tests on sample assemblies.
I had a BP6 with dual celerons overclocked, watercooled with my own custom made waterblocks and that water was chilled using compressor cooler. I remember how condensation formed on the back side of the motherboard, but it never broke. Can't recall what I actually did with that computer but it was my only comp at the time.
Nice repair and a great motherboard. I have two dual 370 motherboards. One Gigabyte GA-6VXD7, and one Tyan Computer S2507T. They both support Tualatin cpu's. The Gigabyte board has dual 1.26ghz cpu's and the Tyan has dual 1.4ghz, and both has 2gb ecc 133mhz ram installed. One good thing with the Tyan board is that it supports ide harddrives over 120gb in size, I tried with largest ide drive 750gb available and no problems at all. The Gigabyte one supports up to 120gb. One funny thing was that the Tyan board was installed in an old case in a dumpster near where I live. I didn't hesitated for one second. Still have it to this day as they become harder to get.
Sweet! That was indeed my dream board back in the day. Never was able to afford it back then, and nowadays I never see them around except on UA-cam. :) Looking forwards to a period correct dream build once you get all the parts you need! Great job on the caps by the way, very useful tip. It's going to look amazing with dual Golden Orbs. :)
A-M-A-Z-I-N-G idea. I have a 6VXDC7 (very similar to yours) and will use this method, as current heatsink on cpu 1 have been "taken care of" on one corner. I guess I will use this method when I can. Appreciate this !!!
Be nice to do this on any Skt A, 754, 939, 940 morherboards. The io emi shields can be cleaned using scotchbrite so you dont have to go through trouble of replacing them
For those larger pins, perhaps an old-fashioned solder sucker (like the EDSYN Solda-Pullit) might be a solution. In some situations that device would probably be faster than the desoldering gun (less maintenance too).
Stuck at the airport with cancelled flights... Cloudstrike? :) The Abit BP6 is one of those boards I wished I could have had back in those days. I think I once saw pics of someone who had 2 golden orb heatsinks on a BP6 but they removed some material on the heatsink in order to make it fit. I did have a golden orb back then. It was installed on a Celeron 566 in a slotket adapter plugged into an Asus P3V4X motherboard. The whole setup was heavily overclocked to 875 Mhz (8x103 FSB.) Those were great days even if basically every mainboard I owned during the capacitor plague era died due to that.
I recapped an Abit BH6 a couple of years ago. It had the same Tayeh caps with no visible bulging. The capacitance and ESR was way off on almost all of the them. I used Panasonic FR caps.
I used a BP6 and Celeron 300A CPUs lapped and clocked to 500mhz for years to run a TFC game server. It also hosted an apache web server. The CPUs were upgraded to Celeron 533s then about a year after that it started hanging randomly and eventually quit booting. Bad caps.
Great board. I scored one, and a pair of Celerons to run in it, from Pricewatch back in the day. It was my BeOS computer, since it could actually use the dual CPUs. I recently re-built a BP6 + Dual Celeron 300 in an Antec Performance II mid-tower. And yes, of course, it needed new caps. I don't think I finished the job, just replaced the ones near the CPUs since they were clearly in need. Some day I'll have to do the rest. I do have concerns with your choice of caps, though. Physical size is usually correlated with capacity, working voltage, and ripple current rating. I'll admit I don't usually bother comparing ratings between original caps and replacements, since I use high-quality, low-ESR caps of the same V and uF rating, and as close to the original size as I can get. I figure it's gotta be as good or better than the no-name wonders found in PSUs and motherboards. But, since yours are substantially smaller, somethin's gotta give. Tech improves, but we're still subject to Physics 1.0.
I made the same mistake with my VP6 board. I only replaced the main suspects but ended up having to replace all the caps on the board to make it work proper
Would love to see a period correct Linux distro on this once you get both CPUs installed. Kernel 2.2 was released in Jan 1999, and added SMP support. So any distro with kernel 2.2+ should work. Also, great tip on the caps!
I had a bp6 over clocked using a window ac unit pumping cool air into the system and two raid card with 800gb of storage running windows 2000 dual boot Linux. It was a sad day when it released it's magic smoke
Thing id worry about with replacing the fan is it might be intended for a fairly high flow or static pressure fan or something and quiet fans might just not meet the spec.
I ran 2x 1000 Mhz PIII's in mine. 1024 MB ram, 7 76.8 GB IBM Deskstars. And some boring SB that gave me no end of problems due to timing issues with dual CPU set up. I ended up buying some ridiculously expensive TB clone. I have no idea what GPU I bought, but I know I went through 4 upgrades of GPUs over the next few years. But my VP6 board had a different layout from yours. Mine didn't have the cpu sockets in a line like yours, but one at the top and one more central. I assume even Abit figured out the flaw with the edge mounted cpu sockets.
I consider dual CPU boards to be useless in practical terms, but still a marvel of technology to look at. I think that board can run dual Tualatin Pentium IIIs by using powerleap adapters. Maybe an option for a future video?
If you want suggestions on thermal paste brands to look at, I recommend Arctic MX-4 or MX-5, it’s really good thermal paste, a lot of system builders and integrators use it
@@Epictronics1 you can certainly get polymer caps in the same size factor you have in the video, with through-hole leads, e.g. something like HS0J158M0808PC or many similar ones on LCSC
@@Epictronics1 ahh sorry - i meant the same form factor as the replacement cap! the one I mentioned should have the same dimensions as the SMD one you used in the video unless I'm missing something?
that cap trick is indeed handy i could have used it yesterday lol the lead spacing can be matched, but not the 8mm diameter cans. not in such high values at least.
@@seritools I found the datasheet for the cap you mentioned. Unfortunately, it's in Chinese so I can't read if they are low ESR and 8mm for this rating
I personally have had more failures with SMD caps than normal through hole, but that would be old ones so maybe the new are better. What is the ripple current rating on the replacements compared to the originals?
I have in my mind toyed with the idea that I cut off the old caps, tin the remaining leg stubs, then tin the legs of the SMD caps, and tack them on... maybe it might work too.
For PSU, to do good for the components, I highly recommend to NOT EVER go with "Period Correct". Because ATX PSU of that time were usually garbage. Some Workstation OEM PSU might be OK, but then again, they're 20 years old and modern PSU are rather cheap and soooo much better electrically its not even funny (for example Ripple at below 20mV isn't uncommon for higher end units) And you also save a bit of power (due to 10-25% higher efficiency)... For the rest, go with "Period Correct", but do your components good and choose a decent, modern PSU...
interested to see what you do with the board i like to heat wiggle the caps out with soldering iron and then use hot air + desolder gun to clear the vias.
If that thing can do 100mhz FSB, you'll be able to do more than run late Win 98 based games. Hunt down some 333, 366, 400 mhz Celerons and see if you can get them running in SMP. Should be enough for early DX8 or DX9 games with a powerful enough GPU.
@@Epictronics1 I'd hunt down a few sets in the middle of that range. I've heard the onboard L2 falls flat on its face beyond 600 ish MHZ unless you're planning to compare high CPU speed (533 mhz) + 66 mhz FSB vs moderate CPU speed (450 mhz) + 100 mhz FSB. Unless you're planning to OC the board to 133 FSB...
I had a Gigabyte board with two Slot 1 Pentium II-350 MHz. Imagine this disappointment when I realized that mostly NT Workstation 4 and Quake were capable of using them. Many years later I knew what happened (and also why multi core CPUs had a hard start) ;)
What model cap are those? if those are the caps I found…they are not low z/esr. They won’t last long if so. They’ll die from the high frequency pulses. I have used this technique myself to replace TH caps though. It definitely works.
16:10 I'd have tried making my own tool to put them back, using a bent copper wire maybe, fold it in two with a bulge at the fold just large enough to fit the part around it, and then curve it…
Is it really necessary to heat up the whole board for desoldering caps? I want to know because I'll likely have to do motherboard repairs sooner or later.
Mr. Inventor, I did this about 1-2 years ago on a Sega MultiMega, but it still does not work. No read from the CD despite new caps, new laser. Well, in the garbage it goes as the 8 Bit Guy says.
Call me sad if you like but I took so much joy when you fitted those moderm smd caps. The fact they looked right at home on the old board made my day. Thanks.
I agree. It looks really neat. I kinda wish I had used SMD caps only on this board
The capacitor method was ingenious. Then you showed your method to restore the rear ports and I actually shouted "you f...... genius" at my screen! I'll be using those both in the future.
Thank you :)
FWIW at least at 150pf Kyocera has parts at 9.5mm and 3.5mm lead spacing that are radial... so no need to torture SMD caps unless that's just cheaper (which it probably is ironically).
@@NullReference119 Unfortunately the only option still made for these are much larger. They could be bodged on but would look really ugly and not allow for large heat sinks
@@Epictronics1 Interesting; because I definitely saw in stock, in production parts on mouser from Kyocera at a height of 9.7mm
@@NullReference119 Did I miss them? Could you share the P/N?
Someone just closing their eyes & randomly watching this clip would think they are on a farm with all the MOOO noises! 🐄
Love the moo-gun:)
Such fancy desoldering. I remember seeing a friend of mine do capacitor replacement about 20 years back on a low-end Soltek Socket 370 motherboard.
He just balanced the board on his lap and using just a well worn regular soldering iron proudly made somewhere in the Soviet Union with a tip about the size of a pencil eraser he simply heated up the legs of each cap and plucked them out by hand, then shoved in new ones as replacements. Was very very fast work and that board lived for very many happy years after!
yeah.. i never preheat a whole board to change thru hole components... that's just overkill.. use a decent iron and pull them bad boys out..
I used to own a BP6, with two 400MHz Celerons running at 600. Loved that board!
Sweet. I'll see if we can get it up to 600!
@@Epictronics1 I'll be watching!
Me too. I had mine up to 550mhz. Loved that box.
I used to run Falcon 4 on Win2K and dual 466's for the SMP - a year or two later I upgraded to a Duron 800 system and it left the BP6 in the dust! Things changed fast in that era.
When overclocked and in SMP, those Celerons tended to leave the entire P3 line behind in the dust
I love the Moo moo gun. its a great tool. Thank you for the great video.
Thanks :)
Nice hack, but I recommend checking for Aluminium-Polymer capacitors. They are available in the mixed case, i.e. SMD case but through-hole legs. They are double the price compared to Aluminium Electrolytic but also have half the series resistance. That makes them perfect for the point of load supports around the CPU. Example: KEMET A750KS158M0JAAE014
Thanks, we'll try them out in a future video
Love the cow image to the desoldering gun, brilliant! Great job
Yep, I LOL'ed when cows showed up!
Thanks :)
Easily the best BP6 capacitor video on UA-cam!
I'll add a few comments from my own experience with refurbishing one of these boards in case it helps someone else out. I swear good info is hard to find on these things!
I re-capped my BP6 board with polymer caps about a year and a half ago. It's totally possible provided you keep to the 8mm diameter required. Many of the larger uf poly caps come in 10mm diameter by default, but if you look hard enough, 8mm is available. The issue is that the 8mm caps are ridiculously tall though, and will absolutely cause issue with 'orb' style heat syncs.
My solution to this was to simply not use orbs. Turns out that AMD "Socket A" coolers are effectively identical in just about every dimension, and can easily be mounted to Socket 370 boards. They fit 100% perfectly and do not interfere with the capacitors at all. What's better yet is the brand new coolers I found had 6cm fans, which meant I could easily upgrade them to Noctuas for silent operation.
I don't own a heater like this, so I did the entire job on a wooden work bench with a soldering iron and de-soldering gun. For stubborn ground-planes I found it easiest to just heat the leg up and pull it out, and then use a 0.75mm PCB drill bit to literally just drill out the remaining solder. It sounds like a violent technique, but I'd argue the risks are equally as high as accidentally melting or discoloring something with too much heat. It worked like an absolute charm for me, and after a day of work my BP6 has been rock solid since, running two 360mhz units at 550 all day long
I also replaced the North bridge heat sync with a bigger one, and added a 40mm Noctua fan on that too. And of course I added thermal paste, since the original famously has none!
Such SMD capacitor hacking has been around in the Walkman community for a while, since many of the teeny-tiny caps required for them are long obsolete, and thus it's the only feasible option! Glad to see people are now able to use it on PCs too
Great write-up, thanks!
Legendary motherboard, great to see one being restored.
I've never seen anyone use that SMD cap trick, it looks amazing!
I used to sometimes, when I did not had the proper values, solder smd capacitors like you did. However, I never tought to file or thin theirs legs, they fitted just fine. The board also look better with those caps.
Gotta love the BP6! Nice job saving this one! I remember destroying mine from a bad heatsink install and being totally gutted (well before I knew how to do trace repair).
Thanks! Same thing with my VP6 board back in the day. I tossed it before realizing I could have fixed it!
I had a BP6 with 2 Celeron 433 running at 490, a Voodoo 3, 256 Mo ram and SCSI disk.
Usually running Linux or FreeBSD.
It was quite a beast in her time ...
Caps started leaking just 3 or 4 years later, but easy to replace.
I loved this board.
Way too expensive now.
Replaced by a dual Athlon XP 1800 modified as MP 1800.
That idea with the SMD caps is really clever! I would do that to all of them not just the CPU ones, they just look far more modern and secure... Very nice board, with many connectivity abilities!
Cheers from Greece, Keep up, Jim
Thanks! Yeah, the thought occurred to me after I was already done with the board. It would look pretty neat with modern caps only
i have the same MB, found it at the scrapyard. no bulged or leaky caps, they look fine, but the board is dead, no post no nothing. i keep it as a treasure, it sure is :) great repair!
Thanks! I can pretty much guarantee bad caps are preventing your board from booting. This board was completely dead but only showed minimal damage to one of the caps
I had multiple machines with BE6 and such and the same era. All failed this way, no visible damage but recap was needed. Now it is fun, but I had like 15 machines dying after around 1 year of office use…
@@SergiuszRoszczyk Yeah, unfortunately, I got rid of my original VP6 back in the day, before realizing it was just the caps!
@@Epictronics1 it was not that obvious then, before it was too late :(
You better put a second Celeron in that BP6. It absolutely deserves it. 😉
Keep an eye out for the build video :)
@@Epictronics1 Oooooooo......
Looking forward to seeing this board fully populated!
Such a cool build! Definitely a dream machine of the days past. Looking forward to its completion.
Thanks! Parts for the build are starting to arrive in the mail
Awesome caps upgrade! I was so happy to see it post, and even happier to see broken sword on the monitor later!
Thanks :) Let's hope that the BS1 reforged version coming out in a few weeks was worth the wait!
@@Epictronics1 agreed! I cannot wait :)
Awesome job. I still use an a8v-xe for XP/98 & the factory caps still look great. Not bad for 20 years.
Thanks. Good to hear, I hope they last
Really nicely done. I'm planning on re-capping an old computer and this video is full of useful information.
Thanks. Good luck with the recap
You aren't a real hacker until you are dual wielding soldering irons
1 is a solder sucker
21:17 “Period correct graphics card”
I built mine around 2000 as a companion to my Asus P2B PIII system from early 1999. It was mostly used with hand-me-downs from my PIII including Diamond Monster Fusion Z100 (3Dfx Banshee) and Voodoo 3 3000 AGP, but it ended up with a its own GeForce 2 GTS-V before I had moved on. It also got some limited use (testing) with a GeForce 3 from my first Pentium 4 system. It was perfect for GL Quake, Quake II, Unreal, Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament, and so much more from the late ‘90s and early 2000s. nVidia was my go-to for SMP gaming.
Yeah, nVidia came out with quite a few cards during the (short) lifespan of the BP6. Many cards to choose from!
Back in the times i could do an average mainboard recap in maybe 15mins. Pre-cut and flux the new caps, mount the board vertically and then use a wide tip with some solder on it to heat both pins at the same time, pull out the old cap and push in the new one without moving the iron away, if needed add some more solder, go to next cap. No preheat or desoldering/clearing needed.
Thank you. I'll keep this cap trick in mind when I inevitably have to re-cap my BP6.
Oh I can’t wait for part 2! Awesome work!
Thanks!
Love the inclusion of the cows every time the desoldering station moos lol. Awesome capacitor hack btw, I've thought of doing something similar for many projects, especially handheld game consoles.
Thanks :)
Adding low temperature melting solder seems to make it easier to desolder components. I have not tried it but the youtube video looked convincing.
Yes, I love that stuff. I use it all the time when I can't use hot air
Very good given the limited time you had. Great work overall
Thanks! Yeah, last week was rough :)
Oh wow I had a BE6 with capacitor issues, same as you show, I also replaced them all and got a few more years out of it
this man has one of the last golden orbs that hasnt shorted out and taken out the fan header
I've got NOS Gorbs coming in for this board :)
That's a fantastic little hack, and a great repair as well. And I love the Flatron monitor! I have its bigger brother, the 915FT Plus; they are magnificent units.
Thanks. I couldn't afford the 915FT when they were new. I got the 17" for my VP6 back in 2000. Awesome combo. Until the caps popped :)
I got mine from a friend who got it from a friend who found it locally... in a different country. It's been around, but I use it as my main monitor. Needs some chassis work, however.
I'm looking forward to the dual Socket 370 shenanigans :) I built a dual Slot 1 system during the weekend based around a Gigabyte GA-6BXDS board with two Pentium IIIs clocked at 600 MHz :)
i have a dell with dual pentium 4 based xeons
Thanks for the tip about modding the surface mount caps, will think about it the next time I'm ordering caps for a repair.
I've polymodded a few motherboards ... generally of the athlon XP variety where the ultra-low ESR caps are simply not made anymore. They look pretty cool when done.
I've still got a bp6 with dual 366's OCed to 550 with a voodoo 5 5500 I put in a ton of hours with windows 2000 workstation running linux, windows 2000 and windows 98. It was a hoss when I put it together back in the day it started with a matrox agp for 2d and two 12mb voodoo2 cards that served me well. It took quite a bit of searching to get two 366's to handle the OC and I paid a small fortune for the voodoo card at launch, never be a brand loyalist kids. I stuck with that dog until I got a GeForce 3. Sadly, it does suffer from cap bloat now and the 5500 has some bad ram too but I won't let them go. Parkinson's has taken my fine motor skills so I'll never be able to fix them myself but I'll never let them go who knows maybe someday I'll find someone local who can get them back up and running.
Sweet machine. Good luck with the project, I hope you find someone who can help out
I had one of these boards back in the day with twin Celeron 300As (overclocked by 50% to 450!) along with the those Golden Orbs. IIRC, I had to to file the one side to get them to fit with the caps. About a year in I did a few cap replacements that many recommended for stability. Originally I ran only OS/2 Warp on it. But later I dual booted to Win 2K after I bought a Geforce2 MX along with Deus Ex which was one of the first games to be coded for SMP.
I wish I would have kept that board.
Yeah, those Gorbs needed some filing to fit with the original caps. Now we've got these hacked SMD caps instead :) I'm going to try this board with OCd 300As in a new vid
I sometimes use these V-Chip capacitors in place of through hole like you did but only when I don't have a better fit in my stock. Bending the legs like that make them weaker (straighten them and bend them back once or twice and they will break), so it's still better to use through hole capacitor.
Also, unlike what it may look like, the NCC MZR series is not solid polymer, it's a regular liquid electrolyte cap. Solid polymer may be more expensive than the regular liquid electrolyte caps, but they have better specs, especially much higher endurance rating. Modern motherboards typically use solid polymer caps except when cutting down cost as much as possible (i.e., OEM stuff).
Solid polymer capacitors come with smaller dimensions.
Also solid polymer caps generally have a lower ESR (and higher ripple current rating which is good) than the liquid electrolyte ones with similar specs, so it is generally advised to use slightly lower capacitance to avoid much higher inrush current that the voltage regulator may not like, here you could use 1000 µF or probably even 820 µF. In some cases you can also go down in voltage rating since the output voltage of this regulator shouldn't exceed 2 V, so you can use 4 V-rated caps for example that might come in an even smaller package.
Apparently the caps for VCore are Tayeh LE series, 8×20 mm with 3.5 mm lead pitch, and the 6.3 V 1500 µF has an ESR of 20 mΩ (which I'm always a bit doubtful about for these low quality caps but let's go with it).
So going for the same diameter of 8 mm with 3.5 mm lead pitch there's for example the Nichicon RL8 series, with the 6.3V 820µF cap at 8×8 mm and 9 mΩ ESR.
People often call replacing liquid electrolytic caps with solid polymer a "polymod".
Thanks, I may try that mod next time
@@Epictronics1 To what piernov said I would just add that maybe you missed that whole category of caps based on your replies to some posts here? So notice how you are in the "Aluminium Organic Polymer Capacitors" category if you browse on Mouser when you reach that RL8 he recommended, in here are also old timers like the Sanyo SEPC (now owned by Panasonic) and some really amazing new caps like Chemi-Con PSG and PSC series with 15000h lifetime, well, the RL8 and SEPC was already crazy with 5000h compared to 2000h of the electrolytic MZR caps you put in, just keep in mind that going down a little in capacitance is usually not a problem, these caps where originally chosen for their low ESR, so seeing as the replacements are all much better we don't need such high capacitance in most cases, but it does depend on the switching frequency of the regulator, but if you only see 7 or 8 turns on the coils you can be sure the frequency is quite high and then bulk capacitance is not necessary, only low ESR, conversely if the switching frequency actually is quite low like in a ATX power supply decreasing ESR from the original caps could instead increase ripple because the circuit was not designed / tuned for that... As a final mention I see the Kemet A758 and A750 on that page: they are actually cheaper than the ones you bought so should be a nice recommendation too!
@@perhansson6718 Ok, thanks. I just quickly checked Kemet A758. It looks pretty good. It's 12mm tall so It might just about fit under the large cooler!
@@Epictronics1 You're welcome, also note the A758KK128M0EAAE014 for example: it is 8mm tall, only rated for 2.5v but that is no problem for the VCore of the CPU... Just be sure to not use it for the 5v or 12v input to the VRM ;)
I did something similar in production with bending leads. Can’t remember if the part becoming NLA was surface mount or through hole, but rather than redesign the board we just bent the leads to use the other version that was still available. I’m thinking it was a decent sized three pin voltage regulator or similar. I don’t know if the thicker leads would’ve been more resilient than the tiny leads that you did, but they’re probably fine too.
It was approved by our customers engineers, our really smart mechanical engineers and our Test group. I’m thinking they may have done a couple shake tests on sample assemblies.
Good to hear. I think they are going to hold up just fine too
I had a BP6 with dual celerons overclocked, watercooled with my own custom made waterblocks and that water was chilled using compressor cooler. I remember how condensation formed on the back side of the motherboard, but it never broke. Can't recall what I actually did with that computer but it was my only comp at the time.
That is a very period-correct hack, awesome :)
A great board and a great restoration job! Looking forward to the next video on this for sure!!!
Thanks!
Ive always had a fascination for multi-cpu systems ever since I heard about dual pentium-pro.
Nice repair and a great motherboard. I have two dual 370 motherboards. One Gigabyte GA-6VXD7, and one Tyan Computer S2507T. They both support Tualatin cpu's. The Gigabyte board has dual 1.26ghz cpu's and the Tyan has dual 1.4ghz, and both has 2gb ecc 133mhz ram installed. One good thing with the Tyan board is that it supports ide harddrives over 120gb in size, I tried with largest ide drive 750gb available and no problems at all. The Gigabyte one supports up to 120gb. One funny thing was that the Tyan board was installed in an old case in a dumpster near where I live. I didn't hesitated for one second. Still have it to this day as they become harder to get.
Excellent finds, nice boards!
@@Epictronics1 absolutely, thanks :)
Sweet! That was indeed my dream board back in the day. Never was able to afford it back then, and nowadays I never see them around except on UA-cam. :)
Looking forwards to a period correct dream build once you get all the parts you need!
Great job on the caps by the way, very useful tip. It's going to look amazing with dual Golden Orbs. :)
Thanks!
A-M-A-Z-I-N-G idea. I have a 6VXDC7 (very similar to yours) and will use this method, as current heatsink on cpu 1 have been "taken care of" on one corner. I guess I will use this method when I can. Appreciate this !!!
Thanks! Yeah, the common hack for these boards was to file/cut away a piece of large heatsinks to make them fit
I still have two of those GlobalWin CPU coolers made especially for the BP6.
Nice trick and always good to see another board saved!
Be nice to do this on any Skt A, 754, 939, 940 morherboards.
The io emi shields can be cleaned using scotchbrite so you dont have to go through trouble of replacing them
For those larger pins, perhaps an old-fashioned solder sucker (like the EDSYN Solda-Pullit) might be a solution. In some situations that device would probably be faster than the desoldering gun (less maintenance too).
Yeah, they seem pretty good
Stuck at the airport with cancelled flights... Cloudstrike? :)
The Abit BP6 is one of those boards I wished I could have had back in those days. I think I once saw pics of someone who had 2 golden orb heatsinks on a BP6 but they removed some material on the heatsink in order to make it fit.
I did have a golden orb back then. It was installed on a Celeron 566 in a slotket adapter plugged into an Asus P3V4X motherboard. The whole setup was heavily overclocked to 875 Mhz (8x103 FSB.) Those were great days even if basically every mainboard I owned during the capacitor plague era died due to that.
Yeah, the common hack back in the day was to cut/file golden orbs to fit the BP6
I can't WAIT for this build!
I recapped an Abit BH6 a couple of years ago. It had the same Tayeh caps with no visible bulging. The capacitance and ESR was way off on almost all of the them.
I used Panasonic FR caps.
Those caps look like quality!
I used a BP6 and Celeron 300A CPUs lapped and clocked to 500mhz for years to run a TFC game server. It also hosted an apache web server. The CPUs were upgraded to Celeron 533s then about a year after that it started hanging randomly and eventually quit booting. Bad caps.
Great board. I scored one, and a pair of Celerons to run in it, from Pricewatch back in the day. It was my BeOS computer, since it could actually use the dual CPUs.
I recently re-built a BP6 + Dual Celeron 300 in an Antec Performance II mid-tower. And yes, of course, it needed new caps. I don't think I finished the job, just replaced the ones near the CPUs since they were clearly in need. Some day I'll have to do the rest.
I do have concerns with your choice of caps, though. Physical size is usually correlated with capacity, working voltage, and ripple current rating. I'll admit I don't usually bother comparing ratings between original caps and replacements, since I use high-quality, low-ESR caps of the same V and uF rating, and as close to the original size as I can get. I figure it's gotta be as good or better than the no-name wonders found in PSUs and motherboards. But, since yours are substantially smaller, somethin's gotta give. Tech improves, but we're still subject to Physics 1.0.
I made the same mistake with my VP6 board. I only replaced the main suspects but ended up having to replace all the caps on the board to make it work proper
omg man, they make THT poly caps that are just as small as the SMD ones your ordered. Did you really grind down all those SMD legs?!
I couldn't find any 8mm wide polly on Mouser. Yeah, it took two minutes. Totally worth it, the board is fixed
Your flight got struck by the crowdstrike
T've pulled that same trick, with SMD crystals mounted on through hole locations.
last night I'm like did I miss epictronic's notification? APPARENTLY NOT lol
Yeah, I got stuck at the bloody airport with canceled flights last week. At least I managed to upload a late video!
@@Epictronics1 I got distracted so I was afraid I forgot. lol
Last week I ordered some 6.3v 1000/1200/1500uf caps which were already swollen!
I was wondering if that was a thing. Apparently, it is... I turned on a NOS server from early 2000 last year. The caps swelled up after one hour
Would love to see a period correct Linux distro on this once you get both CPUs installed. Kernel 2.2 was released in Jan 1999, and added SMP support. So any distro with kernel 2.2+ should work. Also, great tip on the caps!
Thanks!
very nice. I was really wanting to see a wash of that board.
I'll wash another board for you :)
Hi EpicTronics, Nice and great job you did again. Like your work. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands
Thanks!
I’ve used the smd trick myself, why not! ;)
Great minds think alike lol
I had a bp6 over clocked using a window ac unit pumping cool air into the system and two raid card with 800gb of storage running windows 2000 dual boot Linux. It was a sad day when it released it's magic smoke
Thing id worry about with replacing the fan is it might be intended for a fairly high flow or static pressure fan or something and quiet fans might just not meet the spec.
Hmm.. I have to do something about that fan. It sounds like it's about to die. Maybe I'll just replace it with the same spec Noctua
I ran 2x 1000 Mhz PIII's in mine. 1024 MB ram, 7 76.8 GB IBM Deskstars. And some boring SB that gave me no end of problems due to timing issues with dual CPU set up. I ended up buying some ridiculously expensive TB clone. I have no idea what GPU I bought, but I know I went through 4 upgrades of GPUs over the next few years. But my VP6 board had a different layout from yours. Mine didn't have the cpu sockets in a line like yours, but one at the top and one more central. I assume even Abit figured out the flaw with the edge mounted cpu sockets.
I consider dual CPU boards to be useless in practical terms, but still a marvel of technology to look at. I think that board can run dual Tualatin Pentium IIIs by using powerleap adapters. Maybe an option for a future video?
If you want suggestions on thermal paste brands to look at, I recommend Arctic MX-4 or MX-5, it’s really good thermal paste, a lot of system builders and integrators use it
I'll try it out. Thanks
I was wondering, when someone would finally use a cow to add some "dramatic effect" to the desoldering gun's moos.
A bit silly, but it made me smile :)
@@Epictronics1 : If not overused, it's certainly a nice touch, putting an extra smile on people's faces.
Amazing hack!! Loved it, and thanks for sharing
Thanks!
Great job as always!!
Thanks!
"That's my moo!" -- Lenny
:)
that is so beautiful
Thanks :)
That's indeed a nice hack with the SMD caps. Flipping over regular caps would likely do the trick as well, but certainly not look "factory".
The only still available through-hole caps are huge. It would work, but look very dodgy
@@Epictronics1 you can certainly get polymer caps in the same size factor you have in the video, with through-hole leads, e.g. something like HS0J158M0808PC or many similar ones on LCSC
@@seritools I checked and there is only one option still made. They could be bodged to work but would look hideous
@@Epictronics1 ahh sorry - i meant the same form factor as the replacement cap! the one I mentioned should have the same dimensions as the SMD one you used in the video unless I'm missing something?
@@seritools Hmm.. Honor branded. are they any good? Are these low ESR too?
Jamin new low profile caps. And new small micro inductors.
4:05 The Dutch/Friesian desoldering visitor was a little unexpected... 😉
:)
that cap trick is indeed handy
i could have used it yesterday lol
the lead spacing can be matched, but not the 8mm diameter cans. not in such high values at least.
My patrons knew about this trick yesterday ;)
you can most definitely get 8mm diameter 6.3V 1500µF through-hole polymer caps, likely with the right lead spacing too
@@seritools I found the datasheet for the cap you mentioned. Unfortunately, it's in Chinese so I can't read if they are low ESR and 8mm for this rating
That moo / cow was hilarious hehe!!
A bit silly, but it made me smile :)
I personally have had more failures with SMD caps than normal through hole, but that would be old ones so maybe the new are better.
What is the ripple current rating on the replacements compared to the originals?
I have in my mind toyed with the idea that I cut off the old caps, tin the remaining leg stubs, then tin the legs of the SMD caps, and tack them on... maybe it might work too.
me too
For PSU, to do good for the components, I highly recommend to NOT EVER go with "Period Correct".
Because ATX PSU of that time were usually garbage.
Some Workstation OEM PSU might be OK, but then again, they're 20 years old and modern PSU are rather cheap and soooo much better electrically its not even funny (for example Ripple at below 20mV isn't uncommon for higher end units)
And you also save a bit of power (due to 10-25% higher efficiency)...
For the rest, go with "Period Correct", but do your components good and choose a decent, modern PSU...
interested to see what you do with the board
i like to heat wiggle the caps out with soldering iron and then use hot air + desolder gun to clear the vias.
If that thing can do 100mhz FSB, you'll be able to do more than run late Win 98 based games. Hunt down some 333, 366, 400 mhz Celerons and see if you can get them running in SMP. Should be enough for early DX8 or DX9 games with a powerful enough GPU.
I have ordered a pair of 300A and 533. This should be fun :)
@@Epictronics1 I'd hunt down a few sets in the middle of that range. I've heard the onboard L2 falls flat on its face beyond 600 ish MHZ unless you're planning to compare high CPU speed (533 mhz) + 66 mhz FSB vs moderate CPU speed (450 mhz) + 100 mhz FSB. Unless you're planning to OC the board to 133 FSB...
@@ironhead2008 I don't think BX440 will do more than 110 max. Ok! 366s are on the way too now :)
This is great!
Thanks!
You can still buy 1500uf 6.3V 10x13mm THT caps. You can also swap it for polymer ones ULR1500/6.3 wich can not leak.
I couldn't find anything thinner than 10mm on mouser
@@Epictronics1 how much they need to have in diameter? 8mm? Than its my bad. I thought 10mm will fit.
@@Epictronics1 A750KS158M0JAAE014
Has 8mm in diameter and it is polymer. You can buy them at mouser.
@@Epictronics1 A750KS158M0JAAE014 are 8mm in diameter and are polymer. Lead spacing is 3.5mm so it will fit. Never the less your method can be handy.
@@mophus6461 Yeah, unfortunately, 8mm is max. Also, they need to be low enough for the Gorbs to fit
I had a Gigabyte board with two Slot 1 Pentium II-350 MHz. Imagine this disappointment when I realized that mostly NT Workstation 4 and Quake were capable of using them. Many years later I knew what happened (and also why multi core CPUs had a hard start) ;)
Yeah, the fun was somewhat limited with dual CPUs back then. I had a VP6 but the same issue.
Awesome!!! AWESOME HACK!!!!
Thanks :)
Hello!! Where did you get the golden orbs? Good video!! Thanks!!
Thanks! Unfortunately, they are EOL sins forever
Gotta agree with you, that red cap looks out of place.
I had the most outrageous overclock going on on my BP6. What was it? 233 mHz parts running at 666 mHz?
What model cap are those? if those are the caps I found…they are not low z/esr. They won’t last long if so. They’ll die from the high frequency pulses. I have used this technique myself to replace TH caps though. It definitely works.
I don't have the P/N at hand but these are low ESR
@@Epictronics1 ok cool! Good work!
@@thomasandrews9355 Thanks!
@@Epictronics1 I have to use this same trick for nextcube magnetoptical drives
i found 3 this Abit mobo from old tower server. sadly two can't repair since PCB crack and 1 working good and recap all the old CAP.
I still have a BP6 + 2x 333MHz Celerons. It does require some tracework for PS/2 to work unfortunately.
They are worth the job. Good luck
16:10 I'd have tried making my own tool to put them back, using a bent copper wire maybe, fold it in two with a bulge at the fold just large enough to fit the part around it, and then curve it…
Yeah, that would have worked too
Is it really necessary to heat up the whole board for desoldering caps? I want to know because I'll likely have to do motherboard repairs sooner or later.
No, not always, but it makes the job so much easier. Just never heat up a part of the board, that can skew or bend the board
Would adding some chip quick solder help in removing the stubborn caps?
Absolutely. I like to use it when I can't use hot air
I think you have a way too wide tip on your desoldering gun, try one with 0.8 - 1 mm hole
That is correct. My 1mm nozzle is worn out. I have ordered new nozzles but shipping is slow from China
Mr. Inventor, I did this about 1-2 years ago on a Sega MultiMega, but it still does not work. No read from the CD despite new caps, new laser. Well, in the garbage it goes as the 8 Bit Guy says.