AM2 system bit the dust

[Dirk Broer]

My Siemens-Fujitsu (or was it Fujitsu-Siemens? Anyway, a dreaded German-Japanese construction), so kindly given to me by my nephew and running Lubuntu 13.04 on an AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+, has bitten the dust.

It will no more power up, that is: fans (PSU, CPU and GPU) will go spinning, but the monitor says: 'No Signal' and powers down afterwards, and the HDD light will not come up either.

Bought a new PSU: same story.
Stuck Video Card in other system: works there.
Took out all RAM: no beeps at all, nothing.
So it is either the Athlon X2 that has died, or the ECS AM2 Mobo of the Scaleo-P.
In either case they were due to have it coming, but it might have served me better if they had held out till the end of August, when I hope to replace the innards with something more modern.

[Jason1478963]

Is there any sign of bulged capacitors on this board?

[Dirk Broer]

Is there any sign of bulged capacitors on this board?

The row next to the cpu socket does look a bit bulged -but they have been that way since at least last December

A similair mobo, with flat-top capacitors

[Jason1478963]

It may be possible to revive it with a capacitor replacement. I had one that had a few bulged caps and then when you take readings on the ones not bulged they can end up being worse then the bulged caps. If you get them out and can get readings on them you could decide if its worth trying to recap. They have all kinds of info at badcaps.net that helped us rescue a few machines from the scrap pile. We have had good luck with the boards we have done. The father in law currently has an Asus(939 with an FX60) that has bulged caps near the CPU and should be recapped soon. The HP board I recapped would not post when I received it and all seems well now.

[Dirk Broer]

Hi Jason,

Thanks for the advice, but it sounds like I am a bit short of the needed equipment...
I had thought of buying a cheap-as-possible AM3, FM1 or FM2 board that will fit the casing and -for the time being- a cheap-as-possible CPU.
The Athlon64 X2 5000 in that case will be replaced with a (hopefully) more efficient/powerful CPU, the mobo goes in the 3rd hand circuit and the (DDR2) memory can serve other people's systems.

An AM3 Athlon II X2 240 costs 30 Euro's, A FM1 A4-3300 33 Euro's and a FM2 Athlon II X2 340 costs 34 Euro's (and that's prices for new ones),
An AM3 ASRock 960GM-GS3 FX mobo costs 35 Euro's, the quite good FM1 Asus F1A75-M PRO R2.0 mobo can already be bought for the incredible amount of 38 Euro's and a FM2 mobo need not cost more than 44 Euro's (new).

2nd hand AM3 and FM2 mobo's already go as low as 25 Euro's....

[Dirk Broer]

I may not have touched a soldering iron in years, when it comes to software I can tinker with the best:
I re-enabled my son's AGP HD 3850, boinc-wise. It will also run all his games again, and play YouTube flicks.
Solution was run install the 1.4 SDK kit and afterwards the 12.10 Catalyst AGP hotfix. At the moment he is running BOINC 7.0.46 and I see no reason why 7.0.64 wouldn't run

The HD 3850 can run a min_collatz CAL WU in just 22 minutes, my HD 6670s take more than 6 hours to do a OpenCL mini_collatz

[Jason1478963]

Soldering pencil wasn't to badly priced a 40 watt for under 20 dollars. I don't have much experience with this either but most cases you don't have much to lose. The hard part may be sourcing caps if you can't use badcaps.net. It is going to be an ongoing issue with capacitors in older systems. The heat created from running systems 24x7 seems to take its toll on capacitors trying to feed these power hungry CPUs. I had one show up in a NetGear 24 port switch and take out the switch(small kzg in the power circuit). I also purchased a multi-meter to read the old capacitors but this isn't necessary if you see bulged ones its time to update that bank of capacitors.

Interesting fix for the 3850 as i only had luck rolling back to 11.6 for the 4850s.

[Dirk Broer]

It's not so much the cost of a soldering iron (I must have one somewhere on the attic), it is more the other equipment: I have no means of taking a reading on a suspect capacitor.
And the availability of capacitors has dwindled to about zero in the neighbourhood (whatever Tom Waits is singing about it).
But I might give soldering a try restoring a more precious piece of hardware: a Samsung SyncMaster 206BW. It seems you only have to replace three capacitors to get it working trouble-free again,
and you can find out which ones you need easily on the internet.

[Nflight]

I use to work for a company called Greenwood Electronics here in Pennsylvania USA but they have additional affiliations around the world. These people have what You Need in any dimension...

[Dirk Broer]

They seem to be filled to capacity with, eh...errr......capacitors it looks like!