SPCR

My Soltek SL-865PE-L is acting strangely and showing signs of bulged capacitors. I guess I need a replacement, but I would like to keep all existing parts since the machine is quiet and still suits my needs really well.

So, could anyone recommend a really stable socket 478 motherboard that can accomodate 4 GB of memory and Matrox G550 AGP card. Integrated lan and audio would be nice. I have a 400 GB PATA and 1 TB SATA drives that will be used. I'm using Linux.

I think safe bet would be to stay with the same chipset. From ebay I have noticed that there are lots of Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000-G and Asus P4P800 series motherboards available. Previously I have had good experiences with Asus, but I'm not sure with these newer models (ok, socket 478 is not that new anymore :-)

Would you go for Gigabyte or Asus? Or something completely different?

Pasi

Or if you know someone who is handy with electronics and soldering, just look capacitors markings and get same capacitors and change capacitors.

Asus P4P800-series boards ahev been very solid though. I think I would go one of these for easy way. Gigabyte isn't bad either but I haven't much experience of that old Gigabyte boards.

The Asus P4P800 is a super-stable board with a very full-featured BIOS. I've built dozens of systems using them and they are all still going strong. The only better choice in my mind would be an actual Intel D865PERL mobo.

Thanks. I did some research and Intel D865PERL would be ideal from Linux point of view. Intel networking and all. The catch is that I'm using
Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 - M CPU 2.00GHz as a processor.
This will probably work fine, but for some reason I think it will be overclocked to 2.4 GHz with the default settings. Asus might give some more options for getting temperatures down a bit. Probably not an issue here however.

On the other hand, different Asus P4P800 versions have network chips that were not supported from the major Linux distributions when the board was new. This is probably fixed by now, but nevertheless "avoid like plague if you are using Linux" was one of the more memorable quotes that I found from the discussion forums.

You mentioned bulging caps so I would guess that that's the origin of the problems. You can try finding new caps with the same specs and replace them yourself. Might be a much cheaper option.

Case is closed. And hasn't been opened for 8 days while the computer has been running without problems :-)

I don't have the necessary equipment, experience or steady hand that replacing the capacitors requires. But I found a local company that advertised this kind of service (http://www.bitmaster.fi). And everything went great. Motherboard was there a week and the cost was 50 euros, which I find extremely reasonable. Incredible that these days someone actually repairs something.

pojanisu wrote:Case is closed. And hasn't been opened for 8 days while the computer has been running without problems

I don't have the necessary equipment, experience or steady hand that replacing the capacitors requires. But I found a local company that advertised this kind of service (http://www.bitmaster.fi). And everything went great. Motherboard was there a week and the cost was 50 euros, which I find extremely reasonable. Incredible that these days someone actually repairs something.

Too cool. I have an Abit SH-6 that I keep for sentimental reasons. It's from the era of exploding caps (the first one I had blew a cap while it was on my testbed. Quite a spectacular event). When the time comes, I have the tools to fix it, but would just as soon have someone else do it.