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So few capacitors on motherboard?
I just bought an ECS K7VTA3 ver. 8c mobo and noticed that it has only
about a third as many electrolytic capacitors as most mobos. Has anyone ever seen a fairly recent mobo with so few? Before you say that ECS makes cheap mobos (this one was $40 at Fry's, with Duron CPU), my other ECS mobos, including a K7S5A Pro ver. 5, each have about 45 electrolytics, and even my old Soyo Intel 810i mobo, which has only a single-phase CPU core voltage regulator, has over 40. The K7VTA3 also has about six places where capacitors were left out, including one for the CPU core voltage regulator, while on my K7S5A only about two were left out. Has anyone ever noticed an improvement in stability by adding missing capacitors? |
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"larrymoencurly" wrote in message m... I just bought an ECS K7VTA3 ver. 8c mobo and noticed that it has only about a third as many electrolytic capacitors as most mobos. Has anyone ever seen a fairly recent mobo with so few? Ummmm . . . although this should be obvious, not all capacitors are equal. You can't make assumptions about the design of a motherboard based on counting the number of physical capacitors. In order to compare two motherboards, you would need to determine the function of *each* capacitor, and then find the specifications for *each* capacitor that performs a similar function. But for comparison purposes, I've got a fairly recent Athlon XP motherboard by Epox (nforce 2 chipset) that has 13 capacitors clustered around the voltage regulators. There are only 28 total on the entire board, nowhere near 40 or 45. It has been running rock-solid stable for several months, no problems at all. When I was planning the system, my plan "B" was a board made by ECS. I don't think you'll have any problem with your ECS board. The power supply has more to do with stability than capacitors on the motherboard. Get a good power supply, and you should be all set. -Dave |
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"Dave C." wrote in message ...
I just bought an ECS K7VTA3 ver. 8c mobo and noticed that it has only about a third as many electrolytic capacitors as most mobos. Ummmm . . . although this should be obvious, not all capacitors are equal. You can't make assumptions about the design of a motherboard based on counting the number of physical capacitors. In order to compare two motherboards, you would need to determine the function of *each* capacitor, and then find the specifications for *each* capacitor that performs a similar function. But for comparison purposes, I've got a fairly recent Athlon XP motherboard by Epox (nforce 2 chipset) that has 13 capacitors clustered around the voltage regulators. There are only 28 total on the entire board, nowhere near 40 or 45. It has been running rock-solid stable for several months, no problems at all. When I was planning the system, my plan "B" was a board made by ECS. I don't think you'll have any problem with your ECS board. The power supply has more to do with stability than capacitors on the motherboard. I'm probably worrying about nothing, but it's just strange that the same manufacturer would cut way back on capacitors for a mobo that has roughly the same features and number and types of chips as the the K7S5A Pro (even though the former uses a VIA chipset and the SiS). And while it's only ignorant speculation on my part, I can't believe that the new mobo's chips are far more tolerant of spikes or dirty signals than the other mobo's are. I also didn't see any surface mount electrolytics, just ceramics, and there seemed to be just as many ceramics on the older board. But an engineer friend suggested that maybe the new mobo needs fewer bypass capcitors because it has a second ground plane inside -- something about lowering the Q of the board that way. Get a good power supply, and you should be all set. I'm sure won't use my $13 PSU with it; I'm gonna hook it up to my deluxe $15 one! Actually they're really good, Delta and Fortron/Sparkle, bought as close-outs. |
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kony wrote in message . ..
ECS K7VTA3 ver. 8c mobo has only about a third as many electrolytic capacitors as most mobos. my other ECS mobos, including a K7S5A Pro ver. 5, each have about 45 electrolytics, Is it instable? It's been 100% stable since testing started last night, except when I set a jumper wrong and overclocked the 1.6 GHz CPU to 2.0 GHz. I don't overclock, except for my 300 MHz Celeron, which has been at 450 MHz for four years. Are the capacitors running warm-hot? They're all cool, as are all the transistors and chokes, except the transistor of the linear regulator of the 2.5V memory supply. OTOH my ECS P4S5A2 has some switching transistors and adjacent capacitors that have run a bit warm since new, and that old Celeron mobo has a 3.3V switching regulator transistor and capacitors that have been at 70C for four years (was 90C without heatsink). I'm sure it is a cost-cutting measure, since ECS doesn't use any caps of high enough quality that fewer could substitute, like Rubycon MBZ, Fujitsu hybrids, or OS-Cons. All the capacitors are OST brand, except for a few black & white Luxon-G bypass caps. My other ECS boards use Luxons for bypass, another brand for their switching regulators. I didn't see any chip electrolytics, only chip ceramics, and this K7VTA3 mobo doesn't seem to have any more of them than my older ECS mobo. You could add some, but what's the point? A lot of time and $ on more caps, when a different board would have more already. i suppose if you have the spare caps lying around it's something to try, though it might be better left unused, as a backup board, system, in case of emergency. An engineer friend of mine bought three of these mobos and added the missing capacitors, but he does that with every board he gets. He suggested that the K7VTA3 could require fewer capacitors if it has a second ground plane inside that "cuts the Q" of the circuit board. |
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On Sun, 4 Jan 2004 21:40:30 -0000, Conor
wrote: In article , says... I'm probably worrying about nothing, but it's just strange that the same manufacturer would cut way back on capacitors for a mobo that has roughly the same features and number and types of chips as the the K7S5A Pro Err, WHY? Is it exactly the same design? No. Actually it is to a large extent... supports similar processors, chipsets, plug-in devices... might even have the exact same regulators/controller as on their other boards with more capactors. |
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On Sun, 4 Jan 2004 21:39:50 -0000, Conor
wrote: In article , says... I just bought an ECS K7VTA3 ver. 8c mobo and noticed that it has only about a third as many electrolytic capacitors as most mobos. Has anyone ever seen a fairly recent mobo with so few? Before you say that ECS makes cheap mobos (this one was $40 at Fry's, with Duron CPU), my other ECS mobos, including a K7S5A Pro ver. 5, each have about 45 electrolytics, and even my old Soyo Intel 810i mobo, which has only a single-phase CPU core voltage regulator, has over 40. The K7VTA3 also has about six places where capacitors were left out, including one for the CPU core voltage regulator, while on my K7S5A only about two were left out. Has anyone ever noticed an improvement in stability by adding missing capacitors? Pointless exercise. You won't gain any stability by adding them. The reason they'll be missing is because the components for a particular motherboard feature won't be there. Not necessarily true. I've done it, in some cases it helps. This is more when overclocking though, but it stands to reason that as the capacitors age, if they once prevented overclocking by their bare adequacy, they'll sooner prevent spec'd speed. The bottom line is that it's done to cut costs. Clearly none of the (other) manufacturers want to wastefully add expensive parts where there's no benefit. |
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