Sad Motherboard Story

[majmattmason]

Some time ago, my VGX-XL2a motherboard had become unstable. The several capacitors were "fat", especially around the PCI and PCI-e bus (as you can see from the first and second photos). I again want to thank sinful for selling me a replacement board. The old board sat around for quite a while. I recently began to notice issues with devices connected via USB (a tuner, an HD converter, the wireless keyboard adapter) didn't seem to always work quite right (I may have to break down and hope that it's only an issue with the USB controller and get a combo USB/Firewire card to replace the Firewire card, which was to bypass the dead on-board firewire chip). So I decided to recap the old motherboard.

I checked and rechecked (and rechecked!) the caps and ordered a set (about $25). I marked all of them with a purple marker to make sure I didn't leave any them behind and replaced them all. As you can see in the third photo, at least one capacitor leaked onto the motherboard, but it wasn't serious. During the process of changing out the caps, I did break a trace, which I added a jumper wire to repair (the trace went to a RAM connector). Unfortunately, after changing the caps, the motherboard won't even POST anymore. When power is applied, I can turn it on, the fans come up, but that's it. Even with no RAM installed, the motherboard should at least complain with some beeps. Nothing.

I looked over all of the solder pads, but it looks like there was only the one broken trace. But since this is a 6 layer board, it's possible that a trace on an inside layer may have become damaged. If anyone has any suggestions to bring this back to life, that would be great. While the board was having issues before I "fixed" it, it still would POST and even boot up and run, so something happened to it after I pulled it from the case.

Attachments:

[jwa4]

On the trace that got broken, how bad was a the damage? It's unlikely, but could the break of gone through to the layer below? Beyond ensuring the CPU is good the only other thing that comes to mind is capacitor polarity.

This assumes there is a broken solder joint somewhere but if you decide there is nothing to lose you could try baking, I have done this before on other PC parts successfully - hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1421792

[majmattmason]

I verified all the caps were in the right orientation. The broken trace I had to repair wasn't that bad. Since it was connected to the RAM, I tried booting the system with no RAM to see if it would POST with a no RAM found beep sequence, but that didn't work. I tried reseating the CPU as well. It's possible I either broke a lower trace someplace else (some of the caps were difficult to remove) or maybe the board became bad when I removed it or it was in storage. Or maybe the BIOS became corrupt. In any case

[bartekszzz]

Hi!
If you didn't throw your unit away, you can still check short circuit between soldering points of capacitors you exchanged. Maybe there are some cold joints. It's good to use multimeter with such function.

Best regards,
BartekSzzz