I insta-bought a lot of 5 motherboards and got one additional afterwards. There were 2 socket A and NF2-Ultra boards that made me buy it, as it turns out these boards were only things that needed my attention.
Case 1: Gigabyte GA-M56S-S3
Nothing interesting, generic AM2 board, working.
Case 2: F-S D1875
Generic garbage, with garbage CPU, working.
Case 3: Gigabyte GA-8I865GME-775-RH
Really catchy name on this one, again no C2D support=garbage, even for AGP.
Case 4: MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR
This one actually didn’t show any reaction to power at first. Quick look revealed…
Of course, dead capacitors. Now, not always leaky capacitor equals dead board, but if they are a, for example, coupling capacitor, well, You might be out of luck.
Surely enough, after replacing that capacitor board sprung back to life.
I serviced the board and tried to flash a modded BIOS onto it, however, it made the board not recognize unpowered GPUs, so I rolled back to the stock one.
Also, I noticed that the https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/msi-k7n2-delta-ilsr page is a bit wrong, as You can see the chipset is in fact Ultra 400 instead of nForce2 SPP. This doesn’t really matter, as the board has quite poor VRM, making it unsuitable for extreme OC, and for casual OC both the SPP and U400 are just fine.
Case 5: Gigabyte GA-7N400-L
This one worked, but one look was enough to know that capacitors were dead. There was even one that behaved like a diode 🙂
Soon enough I bought enough to repair it…
But during testing almost all 1000uF capacitors got swollen.
So I had to buy capacitors again making this lot COMPLETELY unprofitable. I realistically could have gotten these 2 NF2 boards for cheaper then it took me to repair this one.
After replacing them the board wouldn’t turn on, displaying only 00 in the POST tester. Quick look at the PCB revealed that I accidentally knosked one of the SMD chokes off.
I don’t care about this board THAT much, as long as it’s functional, so a jumper has to cut it.
Surely enough, it worked again.
Case 6: ASUS P5E Deluxe
This board came to me as known non working.
Yeah…
I dont know how to break it to you… IT’S JUST WORKING!
OK, as for refurbrishing and upgrading this was my first time delidding a X38/X48 chipset. Nerve-racking as always, but at least, by looking on the internet, I knew how far to stick the knife in.
All right, looks fine, but does it work?
YES! YES, IT DOES!
At this point I replaced the thermal paste on the NB, SB and under the IHS. I didn’t replace the VRM thermopads, as the original ones were still wet, and the factory ones are always better than OEM pads. Kind of like with a car batteries – original one can be good even for 10 years and good luck getting 5 years on replacement ones.
…
Yes, I drive an old diesel-powered car, how did You know?
…
Anyway, as for the upgrading part – P5E Deluxe is pretty much a poor mans Rampage Formula. That means that the PCB is the same, NB is the same, but for example there are no status LEDs or no quick power-on/reset buttons. However, due to different timings and NB straps P5E doesn’t overclock as good as the Rampage board. How to fix that? Crossflash the BIOS. You will need an engineering version of AFUDOS and Rampage Formula BIOS file.
Tutorial + downloads link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HXQ5V_9fuw
Easy, isn’t it. Because I still had the ‘non-working’ condition in minfd for testing purposes I let it finish a memtest.
No problems found. Board is fully working and ready for some serious C2Q or X3XXX Xeon overclocking 🙂
Afterthough
During testing I got annoyed by old fans on the NF2 boards and opter for a modern, low noise replacements. Also, the Gigabyte board got a Vmod on the HIP6301, the quick and dirty way – a 50K potentiometer from GND to the 7th pin of the controller in order to create a Vcore voltage divider. MOLEX connector is just there for easy monitoring of the Vcore.
Even my old EPOX (also NF2 U400:) ) board got a new NB fan.
Thanks for reading!