Electronics Reversing the side Caps are mounted on (was "caps on wires")

I'd be slightly concerned with the ones just below the CPU socket which don't seem to obviously protrude, maybe just due to image quality.

But you seem to know what you're doing, so best of luck.

 

As I said. This was just a test board that I was trying out the technique on. The board I'm actually doing it on is a dual P3 board that was lying around. I will be doing this mod this evening so everything panning out I should have up the progress tonight or tomorrow.

I sorta shot myself in the foot though. I have the motherboard with me but I removed the chips and the heatsinks so I knew it successfully posted about a month ago. But I have no idea the state of the board now. And since i need to do this mod to attach the new heatsinks I can't test before and after... talk about catch-22.

 

stupidity

Doug...

The point have you pointed out is due to my own stupidity. In my infinite wisdom, i have highlighted the WRONG part of the PCB. I had inadvertantly highlighted some completely unrelated spots, you can just make out the cap pins to the bottom left of the focussed bit, in the UNfocussed bit... whoops

So, in order to try and save some face and disguise such a large oversight... here is an ammended picture with the CORRECT pins shown.

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You are also correct in that the picture quality on this particular shot is pretty bad and it really doesn't give the best idea of what I'm doing. Hopefully the shots tonight will look a little bit better.

Til i start butchering my motherboard...

 

Hehe, thanks for clarifying that.

Thought something was amiss since you seem to know what you're doing.

Good luck my friend, see you on the other side!

 

I am half way through and I can't say that I'm entirely happy with the progress. To start with my digital camera which has served so well all these years (Canon Digital Ixus, first gen! 2.1 megapixel and it cost AU$1200 when I bought it in 2001) has finally decided it's not going to focus when in manual macro mode. hif hif.

But! Onto the more important matter at hand. The caps have been desoldered and I'm finding that all the legs for the ground plane are an absolute nightmare to resoldered. It is nigh on impossible to get it neat on some of the joints. So I am extremely fearful that I may have buggered my board! So... I will continue on valantly and see what happens.

Stay tuned.

 

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/03/10/foxconn_digital_pwm_technology/

 

I'm a little ashamed of myself. My soldering skills have usually been pretty good when building stuff from scratch but this whole modifying something that's already put together is a whole different story. Kinda makes sense really, motherboard companies never really invisage nutbags like myself feeling the need to desolder components in order to fit oversize heatsinks. But enough rant and onto the process.

Got all the caps off no worries. So 1 gold star for the desoldering. Even the niggly ones, add a bit more new solder to the existing joint and then try suck the bugger again... usually after two or so goes the mount hole is nice and clean. But as i said in the previous post, when you have something attached to the ground plane you need to get soooo much heat into it to get the board pad hot enough to make the joint nice and complete.

So that's my excuse as to why my soldering was so shoddy, given a bit more practice and I might get better. Though that said i don't really want to be making a habit out of this desoldering jive.

Onto the pics

One virginal motherboard, before my grubby mitts got to it.

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This was halfway through the bank of four big caps, so far i hadn't run into any major problems.

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Now we have some nice shots that belay the horror that exists on the other side of the board, bask in their glory:

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And now cower in the horror that is "Me Stuffing Up a perfectly GOOD Motherboard!"

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For those of you who have seen good soldering, please look away now. These joints should be nice and points and have a nice little meniscus moving out towards the board. OH THE HUMANITY!

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So... points we should've taken away from this little sojourn into stupidity. One! Ground planes are annoying. Two! Somethings shouldn't be tampered with. Three! Please o please o please god of motherboards, smile upon thee and let this motherboard live on!

Until I test this baby. I bid you adieu!

 

Well! Another day and another simple post.

The Gods of Motherboards have, indeed, smiled upon thee. After much fandangling I managed to get the heatsinks in place. The board was tested against the cut-outs I had made in the motherboard plate and unfortunately they didn't fit, so that's one cross against my name (to be fixed later this week).

Mounted everything up and then took the board home where my modded PSU was waiting. I have shortened all the ATX power cables and made them all black (i will post up these pics when I create a proper project log)

So... all ghetto mounted, found some ram, nabbed a vid card and found one of my old linux installs and tried the power. Weeeeeeee! Away she went, booted nicely.

Your question probably is why goto all this trouble to explain all this if all was good. Well, all is not quite perfect at the moment.

Quickly made a script that will get the box to do something reasonably intensive every 10 minutes and then went off to bed.

In the morning I went to turn on the lights... and... well... nothing... no light. wandered out to check the compy. no fans spinning, no outrageous HDD noise. Tried to turn on the monitor, that was dead too. Hmmm... *bing* circuit breaker has tripped. Wander out to the meter box in my pyjamas and yep, one circuit breaker in the OFF position.

There are three possible explanations and I hope someone can shed some light on which one is correct:

1) My mods to the motherboard tripped the circuit breaker
2) My mods to the PSU tripped the circuit breaker
3) It was a random unrelated trip of the circuit breaker

I am taking home another un-modded PSU tonight to test but if someone can answer my question sooner that'd be great.

 

what exactly did you do to the PSU?


EDIT: stupid question. I should read more.


anyway:

Doesn't sound like anything puter related. if it still boots, try it again.

 

Your opinion has also been agreed upon by our electronics guru at work. So i will turn the server on as soon as I get home and see if the circuit trips again.

I will keep you posted. And might snap some pics of the outrageous heatsinks (in comparison to the originals that is)

 

Well. As you suggested OtakuHawk, this power outage was completely unrelated.

I had the server running from when I got home at 7:00pm til 6:30am this morning when I left the house. No hiccups, no problems, no overheating... still completely ghetto.

Left my camera at work so no new photos but I will endeavour to get some this evening.

And to give an idea on the change in heatsink size, I've gone from the 40mm stock socket 370 heatsinks in scungy aluminium... to 80mm glaciertech copper jobbies. Which in turn will soon have nice big silenx green LED fans sitting atop them.

Again. Will post pics tomorrow.

 

they got beaten
http://www.iwill.net/product_2.asp?p_id=102&sp=Y3

 

As promised I snapped a quick few shots of the server in it's ghetto state.

See the problem with putting the caps on the back face of the motherboard is the bugger doesn't sit flat anymore. Hence all of the DVD cases, all carefully placed so as to properly support the weight in an even and distrubuted manner, which is of course a lie. I just jammed em where I could to get the board off the table and to stop it from put any extra strain on my caps.

So, enough blah blah and more photo-goodness, here it is in it's naked beauty... pffft. bunch-o-components-on-a-desk I choose to call this piece.

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These two shots give you a better idea of how tight it was to get both the heat sinks onto the board. You can also spot where the caps used to live just below the right upper heatsink (line of four of em)

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And finally, the most amusing pic. I figured that the heatsink on the vid card wasn't getting any airflow past it, and thus needed a fan. But since the compy doesn't have a case to MOUNT a fan into ... i improvised. 2 DVD cases + 1 jewel case + hunk of sticky blu-tack = cooling solution.

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And yes. that is the compy's harddrive sitting in the bottom of that shot. It is one of the most offensively loud drives I have ever heard, beaten only by the IBM Deskstar we have here at work that sounds like a small jet aircraft taking off.

Til next time.

 

well good work. i didnt accually think it was going to work but it looks like you did a very good job.

 

Thanks man. I was a little dubious myself. Once I actually get all my photos together for the actual build then I might post a worklog. But we'll see.

Cheers again

 

Heh great soldering skills, I wouldn't even try something like that. Awsome work though