Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

[Mark19960]

Im new to the forum, and I have some images of some boards that
recently decided to act up..

This board was in th wife's computer. she told me the other day that it started to act funny, rebooting or freezing.

So, I cracked it open and behold, one cap vented from the bottom and the others the top.

When I go to work in the morning I will toss some caps on it.

To make matters worse, after I yanked this board out I was working on one of my machines when it rebooted during an installation of Visual Studio 2005
When the system came back up, it had a 'your sytem has recovered from a serious error' dialog.
So, I crack that machine open and low and behold... bad caps.

When you look at the images you may notice one thing:
they are the SAME CAPS. the values are the same, and so is the manufacturer, 'choyo'.
These are 3300uf/6.3 volt 105c rated caps (well, not anymore )

What are the chances that 2 machines within hours of one another, failing?
I am a firm believer in Murphy's law

[linuxguru]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

Not only did they use lousy Choyos, they also skimped by omitting about half the caps on the GA-7ZXE. I'd suggest using 1500/6.3 or 2200/6.3, and populate all the empty locations as well when you recap it.

[kc8adu]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

nice clogged hsf in that second pic.and the dust packed around the ram can cause trouble esp with high humidity.

[Chris1992]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

Murphy strikes again. When you recap the 7vaxp, clean the dust out of the HSF (both CPU and NB) and RAM sockets.

[Mark19960]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

Yeah, the fans are dirty.
I have removed the motherboard and replaced the fans already, replaced the caps with some Nichicons we have here in the shop.

It should last awhile longer.

I just wonder which of my other machines will fail next.

[Newbie2]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

Mark19960, did you use low-ESR Nichicon caps? General Purpose caps aren't recommended at all. But, at least your systems are now working with caps they should have had in the first place.

[kc8adu]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

i see lots of those nb fans dead on boards that are sent in for recapping.
gigabyte should have spent the money on a quality fan rather than chintzy gold plating and stupid stickers!

[Rainbow]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

These small fans found on chipsets and graphics cards are generally crap. The most funny thing was a maybe one year old fan with bad bearing (noisy) - with flashing color LEDs on a MSI board. Maybe they should use high-quality fans instead of the flashing LED crap.

[willawake]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

These small fans found on chipsets and graphics cards are generally crap.

i second that. the ones on geforce 6000 series cards require complete dissasembly for cleaning. crud even collects on the underneath of the fan blades so bad i used alcohol and a cotton bud to clean it off.

[Mark19960]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

The caps we happened to have here in stock ..
(mind you these are for consumer electronics repair)
were Nichicon PM series. They look like they will do the job for the time being.

Specs here

[Chris1992]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

PM are good but PW, HE are lower ESR. Keep the PM, they are way better than the choyo sh!t.

[Jim_IT]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

Hey,

I have a Gigabyte GA-7VAXP than just burst another 5 cps after already sending it back for RMA, November last year when they replaced 2 caps 1000uf 6.3v caps and a mosfet.

I replaced it with an ASUS A7n8X-E Deluxe. No problem. I put the RMA'ed Giagbyte MB back into a new system around December 2004. Again, it started giving me prblems, so I swapped in a new Asus A8N-E.

I still need this MB back in production, but do not have the confidence in my soldering skills to pull all the remaining caps and replace. I plan on sending it to someone, since thenexperation of my warranty was 4 weeks ago. They should have replaced all the caps, wether bad or not.

My question is, as linuxguru states there are a bunch of open spots where it appears additional caps should be, can additional caps be added for additional stability/protection.

Jim

[willawake]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

can additional caps be added for additional stability/protection.

yes but if you do that to boards, you have to figure out what values should be there. perhaps looking at review pictures of the same board you can figure that out or with some trial and error testing instead.

i have to say a general warning though but concerning other boards with 12v that you have to find where the 12v is going cos thats where you need to put the 16v caps and not 6.3-10v.

if you want superior overclock then find the lowest esr caps you can and use those. other things you can try are some little heatsinks on the fets, a superior northbridge cooler, an excellent cpu hsf with only a thin layer of arctic silver, good case cooling and a quality psu with good caps will give you the best performance under air.

but if you are talking about stability, even if you just replace the original cap positions with same value caps from a good manufacturer it should be perfectly stable and last for years.

November last year when they replaced 2 caps 1000uf 6.3v caps and a mosfet.

was it not posting at that point?

[Jim_IT]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

As far as I can remember, the first time the board would not post.


This time, I had a MCE 2005 install running, and it became buggy. (freezing, etc.) I pulled MB and CPU, then tried a new XP install on a new HD. XP Install almost completes normally, i.e. files cannot be copied, then are copied once retried.

At power on, there is a high pitch whine is coming from the MB. At first, I thought noise was the from hard drive but another HD sounded the same, resulting in a closer inspection of MB.

This is the way it looks now.

Jim

[willawake]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

can you email me the full pic

if you are based in us/canada then Topcat can recap it for you.

the whine can be from smt components or the coils when the caps are bad. some boards do that from the coils when new though.

[willawake]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP



close up from above image



close up from above image



busted fets prior to "repair" by gigabyte

i wanted to see the big pic cos the fets looked funny but it was just the soldering from the repairs.

[Jim_IT]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

Considering that this is an AMD XP MB and the known problems of heat generated by AMD XP CPUs, it's no surprised that cheap caps failed. CPU ran 47c, System around 42c enclosed in the case. I was running the retail HSF because it is very quiet, but lacks big time cooling.

This was a media PC with a ton of components and it needs to be somewhat quiet.

Jim

[willawake]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

those purple ones look like GSC?

i have seen GSC fail on an althlon system in a well ventilated case, although not so spectacularly as that but we might have caught that one early

[MD Willington]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

Considering that this is an AMD XP MB and the known problems of heat generated by AMD XP CPUs...
Jim

How hot?

Highest thermally speced processor for that board the XP3200+ was ~77W...

K7_Electrical_Specification_Rev_ENG.pdf (application/pdf Object)



Prescott is ??? ... 100W+

The Prescott 3.20E we have has a TDP of 103W. Compare that to a Northwood 3.20C at 82W

Lets not go down that road....



Anyway....same deal Gigabyte 7VAXP Ultra...from a fellow poster at the amd forum...IIRC OST or GSC capacitors onboard...

board is dead right now...he's going to see if he can measure Vcore at the power section of the board...

MD

[bvchurch]

Re: Gigabyte GA-7ZXE, GA-7VAXP

Anyway....same deal Gigabyte 7VAXP Ultra...from a fellow poster at the amd forum...IIRC OST or GSC capacitors onboard...

board is dead right now...he's going to see if he can measure Vcore at the power section of the board...

MD

That person he is talking about is me.

See here http://forums.amd.com/index.php?showtopic=64285

Anyways I did indeed have a Gigabyte 7VAXP Ultra die on me. However looking at the capacitors I see no damage, no bulging, no leaks etc. Seems to me the board just up and died. Though I am out of the Gigabyte warranty I am dealing with VIsa on it. The visa money will go towards a new computer, but instead of replacing my capacitors on the motherboard i am just going to spend ~$34 for an ECS Kt600 a motherboard.