bx133 capacitors

My main PC just started getting wierd on me. At first I thought I had static shocked my video card, but now I am fairly sure it is because of the motherboard.

A few months ago I picked up a tualeron and a bx133 for cheap to run it on. I bought the board off of ebay. The board was a factory refurb from abit. I asked the seller about the caps and he siad they were in great shape. They were. Now about 5 of them are rounded at the top, and one is leaking juice. Where it took a few tries to boot the PC up a while ago, now it will not boot and if it ever does it will reboot randomly and stay off because it will not reboot.

I have two options. Try and get Abit to fix it, or locate the caps and solder them on myself. I am alright at soldering, but would obviously have someone more experienced do it. Because it was factory refurbed, the seller said Abit might do good on a 1 year warranty if anything went wrong. Considering I have only had the board in my PC for 4 months, they should.

You think this could work? I have no manual or box for the board, just whatever spec numbers may be on the board.

If I cant get them to fix it, I will need to do it myself. I remember a thread on here a while back stating the model number of capacitor that would take the place of the defective units well. I did a brief search for it and couldnt find it. I am on the floor in my living room on a computer that I use for watching movies on a tv, so reading text isnt fun.

Thanks.

And I wouldnt mind just putting down 200-300 on a northwood setup finally. I was planning on doing it soon, but would just like to get more life out of this tualeron setup. It is definately as quick as anyone would need for anything but games, and for that it doesnt do too bad. Besides, if I: wanted better framerates I would do much better upgrading to a 9500 rather than upgrading my mobo/cpu setup.

I stumbled upon this site.

http://home.att.net/~garyheadlee

He repairs boards caps for about $50.

Unless I can find a way to hold Abit accountable for the repairs it looks like I will attempt the repair myself. (If you know of a place where the thousands of users with fried boards are rising up against the mobo manufactureers let me know, haha.)

I can buy the 23 caps I need for about $16.

http://www.mouser.com//index.cfm?ha...7-UPW1A152MPH6+&searchby=PartNumber&x=16&y=11

Gary's site says they are what he uses, so I will hope they will work for the BX133.

Just to be sure, does anyone know if a 1500uf cap will work on a board that originally used 1000uf caps?

I have a little electronic component knowledge. And have had a bit of soldering experience. I used to make parallel port connectors for TI calculators and have installed a few modchips in PSXs. If anyone has any tips, or websites with more detailed info about this, please let me know.

I dont care too much about this motherboard, but if I lost it that would be $75 down the drain. I would then need to spend money and time upgrading to a p4 setup.

I had a sim problem, on a BF6 board....
I had to replace a few CAPs... I did however use the same resistance CAPs, keeped all 1500uF CAPS at 1500uF, just put on ones that were rated for a higher voltage.....

they 1000uF CAPS Should work....
But why dont you just goto a electrionic store and pick the Parts up, they are dirt cheap and you will not have to spend any money on shipping.

I replaced my bx133 with the caps from digikey using the link from that guys site. It cost me about $50us to get 38 panasonic 1500uf caps shipped overseas to New Zealand. I don't think you can use any old 1500uf cap from the local eletrical store either they are a special type and thats why they cost alot.
Your bx133 should have 1500uf cap as standard, all the old abit boards used those ugly green jackcon caps. If you send your board to abit they will just replace only the bad caps on the board with the same brand new ready to go bad jackcon caps so don't even try abit.
Since I can only do basic soldering a friend hekp me with it. I didn't really like his idea of using the board wrapped in tin foil as a anti stactic strap, not to mention he was drinking. Well the board work but would blue screen apon installing xp. I still think I can fix it by taking them out and re-fitting them or I could of had something setup/pluged in wrong.
Since my bx133 was not working, I got a temperary board from my mate above, it is an abit SA6R. The board wasn't going that well so he took it out of his machine about 5 months ago. Most of the time it didn't want to cold start. I used it for a month before it totally gave out on me. The condition of the caps on the SA6R looked far worse than the bx133. There was 18 of the *******s. This time I try it myself, I heated up a cheap 40w soldering iron, apply to bottom of one side of cap prong, pulled out one side by pushing on the cap, then heated up the other prong and pulled that directly out, did this with the rest of the caps, I then heated the solder that was leaft behind in holes and used a solder sucker to clear them, put in new caps, solder them up, cut the long wire piece off , and I was done. Fire it up and my solder job of 18 caps work a treat. I couldn't believe how stable the board was now, it never has missed a beat the new caps in, in fact I could overclock more stable too. The quaitilty combined with the larger physical size of the caps must of done this. Even although I was using this board when it was in bad shape, I could say it would run better now than the day it was new.
Those green jackcon caps abit use have been know to fail within as little as 200 hours, the average is about 2000 hours. Not all abit boards fail some just keep on going without the problem arising, some keep going with a couple of bad caps and the rest stay ok. I have built 2 systems with older abit BE6 boards and I know they are still going as of this day.
I hope you get your bx133 working again, in my eye this is the ultimate BX board and still kicks the *** of i815 boards. One day soon my bx133 WILL live again, just right now I have 2 new mainboards(abit IT7 and asus tusl2-c) so the bx133 and the SA6R are in the spare room :\
let me know how you get on with it all. fixing the caps is an adventure.

I saw in another thread that you had the same exact symptoms on the BX133 as me, and it ended up being the caps. I am very glad you found my thread to respond to.

I have a few other electronic projects I have been wanting to start for a while, so I will probably order up all of the parts I need at one time and do the other things as well. (I need to order the correct resistors for an 8500 volt-mod, radioshack only has a few of them in a $15 variety pack. I am also going to try and make a dual shock adapter for my PC. should be fun.)

As I said before I picked my bx133 up off of ebay fairly recently. I needed a board to get a tB1 celeron working on. I have a cuv4x but I found it would not go past 120mhz FSB with a pin modded tualatin. I couldnt find the St6 or other 815 boards for sale anywhere, so I just got a bx for cheap on ebay. Like you said the bx133 is the best bx board.

anyway, the board was factory refurbished. I am guessing this means the caps failed before so Abit repaired the busted ones and dropped the board off to this other guy somehow. It has those green jakcons you are talking about, but some are black also. I think I checked before and they all said 1000uf on them, maybe I am wrong. Also, there are only 23 total on mine, not 38.

This setup is really awesome. From my cuv4x with a 700 pIII coppermine @980, I upgraded for $40 to a 1.2 tualatin that can do a sweet overclock as well. It kind of sucked I had to pickup a bx133, but soon I will have 2 WD800JB in RAID. I love value, and this setup is lightning fast now for so little money. My system could probably use DDR for games, but other than that I dont know how someone could need more than 1.5gigs.

Before the cpu was a bit unstable up high. It would only do 131mhz FSB at max voltage. I suspect that was caused by the caps. It would boot at fsb speeds way up there, but it was unstable like it needed more voltage, it was still running cool as hell mind you. It would go from something like 130mhz FSB at 1.6v to having problems with stability at 133mhz at 1.75v. Most tB1 1.2s would do 145fsb, or atleast 133.

oh, and that stuff about your friend was funny. I will try and do it myself or have someone with a bit more experience help me out.

Alright, I checked the board again. It has 11 1500uf caps. The others are 1000uf, I guess there are probably 12. Some of the smaller caps (1000uf) are black, and some are scattered across the board. None of the 1000uf caps appear to be causing problems yet, even though they are all still jakcons.

Did you replace the 1000uf caps also? Do you even have the 1000uf caps, or did they swap some of them on my board?

If all of the 1000uf caps SHOULD be 1000uf caps, and not 1500uf caps, I am thinking of just replacing the 11 1500 caps. Doing the others later if they start acting up. Because now almost all of the 1500uf caps are round topped and or leaking fluid, I am thinking the others are less likely to fail or had just been replaced by Abit.

sorry, i forgot to say I ordered 38 cap more than I needed. worked out cheaper since they took off the handling believe or not.
ok, I now have the board in front of me. My bx133 has 12 caps in total between the sloket and the atx connector. It looks like this: 3 caps in a row closest to the axt connector, and 9 caps in a row closest to the socket.
My board has v1.01 on the sticker where the bx133-raid is printed on the board. Maybe your is a v1.0 thats why your only has 11 caps.
All other caps are fine on the bx133 boards even though they are also jackcon brand. Only worry about the larger green jackcon 1500uf ones. Its rare for the other caps on a bx133 and other abit boards to fail.
Heres a link to a picture of the caps I replaced on the bx133. The problem with this were the replacements were so damm big I couldn't fit them in nicely together. Your get the idea once you see.
http:\\www.geocities.com\freewebsitev1\

Hmmwell I have a v1.01 board also. I have a row of 3, and then a row of 8 closest to the socket, with the ninth one on the inside of the board being a 1000uf black cap.

I will try and see if I should switch the last one to a 1500 model. I would really think this would be the same for all boards, especially the same version of the same board. I will find pictures of other bx133s and see what I think.

Were you completely sure the last one on your board wasnt a 1000uf cap? Maybe that is why it is acting up. Just thinking of things that could help.

yes im 95% sure, no way of telling now since the old ones have been discarded.

is your ROW of 3 CAPS 6.3V 1500uF?
Any of them discoloured or looks bad?
Just wondering is thouse are the ones that died on my board that I had to fix....

Oh an no thier is nothing special about the panisonic caps. The local electronic stores caps will and do work just fine. Just get some quality parts

I sent my board to ABIT, and they replaced it for $25, board is running great now! Overclocking my P3 750 to 1000GHz! (133x7.5)