Dr. Cheap's House of Hacks

Motherboard capacitors modifications

Circa 2000

I had an ABIT BP6 motherboard, the legendary dual celeron overclocking dream board of the late '90s. The computer was always lockup up at the most random times, even during long idle periods. After much research, I found out that my board had a known issue with the voltage regulation circuitry, which resulted in frequent lockups.

There are a few solutions to this problem out there, and I chose to first go for a capacitor replacement. Namely the EC10 capacitor, which was right along the top edge between the CPU sockets. Unfortunately I don't have any "before" pictures as this was done a few years ago. Here is a nice shot of the new one in place...

Fortunately I had the hardware monitoring software logging all the data it collected, and was able to produce a graph of the Vtt voltage. It's very obvious where I did the fix.

Running two Celeron 366 chips at 550 MHz, standard core voltage, no lock ups, enough said.

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