Silver Strike Bowling 2005 faulty PC

[MrMatt]

My SSB  2005 stopped booting last week.   One time I powered it and just got a blank screen, I pulled the power and tried again and it booted.  That night I tried to power it again and it would not boot at all.

I noticed there was a bad 2200uF cap on the motherboard and all 5x Skywell 1000uF caps were bad on the gfx card so I changed them all and the PC booted again and appeared to be fixed.  It worked fine for a few days.

Now I have the same issue with the PC not booting.  I've checked the caps and even changed the 2200uF cap a couple more times and reflowed all of the gfx card caps, but the fault will not clear.

The PC is powered, all of the fans are spinning, there's an LED light on the board, the HDD is spinning up.  But there is no VGA output at all.  Motherboard is an Intel D865GLC.

There are no beeps but the PC didn't beep even when it works properly.  I tried some new RAM and re-seated the CPU with some new HTC but it didn't change anything.

How can I fault find this at this point?  There is no VGA from the motherboard VGA either but I don't think there is on this PC when it works.

I don't have another motherboard with an AGP connector to be able to test the gfx card, and I don't have any other AGP gfx card, so I don't know at this point if the issue is the motherboard or the gfx card, or both.

TIA

[lilshawn]

typically if you have one bad looking cap, the ones that don't look bad...are bad.

it's generally a good idea to swap out most of them if you find blown out ones. (basically anything bigger than 100uf but there are exceptions)

if you post a nice clear pic of the motherboard, i can use my awesome mspaint skillz to tell you all the ones that are going to need to be swapped out.

[MrMatt]

Hi, thanks.  Photos below.  The cap I already changed is the 16v 2200uF, in the top right next to the SATA connector.

I have changed all of the caps on the GFX card except for a weird 540uF 4v cap which I cannot find a replacement for.  As an aside, I've just ordered a replacement CPU and identical GFX card, just in case.  My current CPU is 2Ghz and the replacement is 2.8Ghz so even if it wasn't faulty I can at least say I am upgrading it!

The PC should beep when powered right?  Could the speaker be faulty too??  It definitely never beeped when it worked, or now.

TIA

[MrMatt]

When I try to measure the line of caps below the CPU, they all will not give a measurement in situ.  Is that normal?

[MrMatt]

typically if you have one bad looking cap, the ones that don't look bad...are bad.

it's generally a good idea to swap out most of them if you find blown out ones. (basically anything bigger than 100uf but there are exceptions)

if you post a nice clear pic of the motherboard, i can use my awesome mspaint skillz to tell you all the ones that are going to need to be swapped out.

I've just ordered some replacement 1200uF 16V, 820uF 6.3V, 470uF 16V and 470uF 10V capacitors.  Again, I cannot find the odd 680uF/25V polymer caps anywhere.

[lilshawn]

sorry for the delay, ive been sick with the flu the last week.

usually the biggest culprit of these kind of random boot issues is the 4 small caps under the heatsink ive circled together. but generally i replace al the circled ones.

but i think if you take out some of those 4 caps, youll find them blown out on the bottom where you cant see them.

[MrMatt]

sorry for the delay, ive been sick with the flu the last week.

usually the biggest culprit of these kind of random boot issues is the 4 small caps under the heatsink ive circled together. but generally i replace al the circled ones.

but i think if you take out some of those 4 caps, youll find them blown out on the bottom where you cant see them.

Awesome.  Thank you.

I've just ordered the missing 22uF and 100uF 25V caps I would need now.  I'll wait until I've fully recapped this until I try to turn it on again so will have to wait until the weekend for all of the orders to arrive.

Cheers.

[lilshawn]

oh, and as for the oddball 680uF 25V  caps, it's fine to change them out for low ESR electrolytics. some of those values in poly caps are almost impossible to find.

it would probably be okay to throw a 1000uf in its place too. all these caps do is filter power... the exact value is not super critical, as long is its better than what's there... (basically nothing) just don't go to overboard or you can blow out a regulator on powerup with the excess load of having to charge up a much much too big cap.

if i encounter something needing to be recapped like a power supply, i would take inventory of what's connected to where, and then figure out what i have.

for example if a 5v line in a power supply has three 1000uf caps and a 470uf (for 3470 total) and i'm out of 1000uf's, i'll go ahead throw two 1500's and two 220's... that way the ESR value of the circuit stays the same (with 4 total capacitors sharing the load) and the total uF (3440 vs 3470) is pretty damn close...and better than the blown out ones in there to begin with.

[MrMatt]

Noted.  Speaking of Polymer caps, I also have a faulty GT2005 board I gave up with because I assumed the GFX card had failed and I couldn't find another card with a PCI I/F to replace it with.

If I put this card into another PC it doesn't work.  It was missing one of the 10uF 16V polymer caps at the bottom of the photo and I replaced it with an electrolytic cap but it still didn't work.  I've just ordered 10x 10uF 16V polymer caps to replace all of them on this board but I don't think it's going to fix the card.

Do you have any other suggestions what to do?

[lilshawn]

for whatever reason, those video cards can just die.

typically it gets overheated and you can tell if this is the case by the green board turning brown. (especially around the regulator heatsink and the backside of the main GPU die)  they are getting to be a rare as unicorn poo.

if you know at all if it worked...maybe... but chances are really REALLY slim. you really got to get these cards before they grenade.

that said, i may have one in my parts box. i'll have a fish around and see.

[MrMatt]

for whatever reason, those video cards can just die.

typically it gets overheated and you can tell if this is the case by the green board turning brown. (especially around the regulator heatsink and the backside of the main GPU die)  they are getting to be a rare as unicorn poo.

if you know at all if it worked...maybe... but chances are really REALLY slim. you really got to get these cards before they grenade.

that said, i may have one in my parts box. i'll have a fish around and see.

The backside looks normal.  I'll change all of the caps and hope for the best.  This card was dead when I got the GT2005 board.

[MrMatt]

What I'll do is replace those polymer caps and measure the two voltage regs, if either of those aren't working properly I'll replace them and if it still doesn't work I'll toss the GFX card.

[MrMatt]

sorry for the delay, ive been sick with the flu the last week.

usually the biggest culprit of these kind of random boot issues is the 4 small caps under the heatsink ive circled together. but generally i replace al the circled ones.

but i think if you take out some of those 4 caps, youll find them blown out on the bottom where you cant see them.

I've just finished replacing all of the caps you circled and the motherboard still has the same issue, all fans spin up, there's a green LED on the board but it doesn't boot.  The HDD spins up with power but there's no activity after that.

Am I missing something obvious in the connections??  I've put this system together dozens of times but it feels like I'm missing something.

Just to sum up, the PC wouldn't boot one time, then worked when I pulled the power cable and replaced and played fine all day. Then the next day it wouldn't boot up again.  I saw a blown cap on the motherboard and 5 on the GFX card so I replaced all of them and the PC booted fine again.  It worked for a few days until I tried to put it all back together again in the cab.  I also tried to upgrade the RAM from 128MB to 512MB at the time this happened.

I've now tried a raplcement GFX card but the fault remains when using that card.  I got a replacement CPU but some of the pins were bent and missing (damn you eBay!!).

[MrMatt]

If I start the PC without the 4pin 12V power connecter then the PC does the same thing as with it connected.  Could this 12V be missing on the board?  There is 12V on both pins on the MOLEX.

[MrMatt]

typically if you have one bad looking cap, the ones that don't look bad...are bad.

it's generally a good idea to swap out most of them if you find blown out ones. (basically anything bigger than 100uf but there are exceptions)

if you post a nice clear pic of the motherboard, i can use my awesome mspaint skillz to tell you all the ones that are going to need to be swapped out.

I've still got a few new caps leftover.  Is it worth changing some more to see if it fixes the motherboard, and if so which ones should I start with?

Cheers

[lilshawn]

if you power on the computer and arent getting the POST beep, there is something preventing the startup process from starting the BIOS... bad ram bad CPU...

now, i'm not saying you have bad ram or a bad CPU, im saying in order to pass the POST test, the computer needs a CPU and RAM to be detected... before the CPU begins loading the BIOS.

in a nutshell... the computer board gets power... the computer kicks on and starts powering the stuff... ram, rom,chips,cpu,etc. once the power is settled, a hard coded instruction in the CPU starts reading and loading info (a bootstrap program) from the BIOS chip into RAM where it can start to run. once this is done and the program hits the end and get's it's instruction to run, and then has indeed started to run, the computer does its BIOS "BEEP" sound and begins to load the things it needs to boot. (programs to initially access the harddrive floppy drive video etc.) all this is the first 1 or 2 seconds of boot, done before anything is even displayed on the screen.

if it's playing dead, something is preventing the CPU from loading that initial bootstrap and loading the BIOS program so it can start to run.

dirty power can cause the CPU to never become ready.
bad ram connection can cause  there to be nowhere to even put the bootstrap
bad CPU pin connection can hang the CPU

typically the board will issue diagnostic beeps if there is an issue like these though, but not always.

[MrMatt]

if you power on the computer and arent getting the POST beep, there is something preventing the startup process from starting the BIOS... bad ram bad CPU...

now, i'm not saying you have bad ram or a bad CPU, im saying in order to pass the POST test, the computer needs a CPU and RAM to be detected... before the CPU begins loading the BIOS.

in a nutshell... the computer board gets power... the computer kicks on and starts powering the stuff... ram, rom,chips,cpu,etc. once the power is settled, a hard coded instruction in the CPU starts reading and loading info (a bootstrap program) from the BIOS chip into RAM where it can start to run. once this is done and the program hits the end and get's it's instruction to run, and then has indeed started to run, the computer does its BIOS "BEEP" sound and begins to load the things it needs to boot. (programs to initially access the harddrive floppy drive video etc.) all this is the first 1 or 2 seconds of boot, done before anything is even displayed on the screen.

if it's playing dead, something is preventing the CPU from loading that initial bootstrap and loading the BIOS program so it can start to run.

dirty power can cause the CPU to never become ready.
bad ram connection can cause  there to be nowhere to even put the bootstrap
bad CPU pin connection can hang the CPU

typically the board will issue diagnostic beeps if there is an issue like these though, but not always.

ThisnPC didnt beep even when it was booting ok.

I'll get another CPU and try that but I wont be able to do it for a few weeks now.

I'll report back once I've done it

Thanks.

[MrMatt]

Oh yeah, there is one more thing which may or may not be important in why this PC broke down.  It was always used on another cab in medium resolution, but I had just put this PC into another cab with a VGA CRT and started to run the game on VGA output.  The PC broke down on like the 5th time of running on VGA.

[lilshawn]

i wouldn't discount the blown caps on the video card contributing to it getting pushed over the edge. higher resolution does use more energy and computing power. in the scheme of things, it's not much...but not a zero amount more that's for sure. i wouldn't doubt if it was marginal... the additional tiny bit of stress of having to do 2x as much work.

normally in a case like this, i would swap out all the parts to see if something died (ram CPU video card, power supply etc.) with known good parts to eliminate those as a source of issue, so if indeed it is still a dead rogue cap on the motherboard somewhere causing it, i can focus my efforts there on the board and i'm not chasing a red herring changing out all the little caps and stuff when it's actually due to a plotzed CPU.

that said... double check the polarity of your capacitors you've installed to make sure one didn't slip in backwards, that can cause it to play dead.

[MrMatt]

Cool.

I'll get another CPU and some MOLEX connectors and hook the power up to a JAMMA PSU.

Cheers again for the help.  I'll be back in a few weeks because of work.

[MrMatt]

I'm now back to fault finding this SSB PC after a couple of months off.  I had quite an ordeal finding parts because our postal system went on strike plus they were overwhelmed at Xmas, so I bought 2 CPUs, one which got lost, another arrived broken.

I bought a whole untested identical motherboard with CPU and RAM which I've just tested in my cab and works.  I put the new CPU into my faulty motherboard and it worked first time, so I figured that my CPU was faulty this whole time.  Put my old CPU into the new motherboard and it worked!

I went back to my old motherboard with my old CPU and it didn't work.  Put the new CPU back in and it didn't work now.  No combination of parts with my old motherboard worked.  My faulty motherboard is again faulty.

So I've now seen this a few times where if my faulty motherboard is left unpowered for a long time, it will boot once and work fine, but it will not boot again.  Any idea what this could be?  I have recapped most of the board, is there a cap which can cause this fault until it is fully discharged?

I have a spare of everything now; 2x motherboards, 2x CPU, 3x RAM, 2x GPU.  The only consistently faulty part seems to be my original motherboard.

What is bothering me is the new motherboard has a bunch of caps which are again swollen, but I don't want to replace them and risk breaking a working system.

Any suggestions about anything are greatly appreciated as always.

TIA.

[lilshawn]

ive seen all manner of weird things happen to motherboards. especially once the caps go bad and it stops booting...your chances of resurrection go down significantly.

and yes, i've absolutely seen a board work once and that was it. i ran through 3 motherboards for a game one time for a total bill of just over 1200 bucks. original one died... bought a used one for 550, recapped it... and it worked for 3 days... dead. bought another one 600 ish... booted one time ran for an hour, froze...and that was it. dead.

usually its the regulator FET's that die or the related control circuitry. kinda comes with the club when you use fat 12v rail to power stuff... but then to try and pare it down to 0.5 to 1 volt... when it goes wrong, it really goes wrong.

[MrMatt]

ive seen all manner of weird things happen to motherboards. especially once the caps go bad and it stops booting...your chances of resurrection go down significantly.

and yes, i've absolutely seen a board work once and that was it. i ran through 3 motherboards for a game one time for a total bill of just over 1200 bucks. original one died... bought a used one for 550, recapped it... and it worked for 3 days... dead. bought another one 600 ish... booted one time ran for an hour, froze...and that was it. dead.

usually its the regulator FET's that die or the related control circuitry. kinda comes with the club when you use fat 12v rail to power stuff... but then to try and pare it down to 0.5 to 1 volt... when it goes wrong, it really goes wrong.

Thanks.  So should I just toss that faulty motherboard or is there anything to investigate and try to replace?

Would you recap the swollen caps on the new motherboard, or wait?

[lilshawn]

Thanks.  So should I just toss that faulty motherboard or is there anything to investigate and try to replace?

Would you recap the swollen caps on the new motherboard, or wait?

given enough time, money, and brute force ignorance... anything is fixable. just have to decide what your time is worth.

Couldn't hurt to recap the new board... since it's likely a used board from who knows where and ran for who knows how long.

[MrMatt]

Thanks.  So should I just toss that faulty motherboard or is there anything to investigate and try to replace?

Would you recap the swollen caps on the new motherboard, or wait?

given enough time, money, and brute force ignorance... anything is fixable. just have to decide what your time is worth.

Couldn't hurt to recap the new board... since it's likely a used board from who knows where and ran for who knows how long.

So, as expected, I have a new set of problems with this new motherboard!   

It seems that every time I boot the PC for a session, it will hang or reset one time after about a minute or two, and then after it boots again it appears to play fine for the rest of the day.

There is a "Cooling System" Icon always showing over the title and attract screen from as soon as it boots which I never saw before on the old motherboard.



I've checked the temps and they seem find except it is missing a fan for Fan 2 and Fan 3 speed is flagging as low rpm.



I haven't changed any settings with the BIOS for this PC, are there some settings I should use?  Can I also update the boot flash screen to the yellow iT Logo that my old system had instead of the Pentium4 flash screen?

Or is this random reset/hanging issue another motherboard recap??

[lilshawn]

the overheating icon thing is something that just seemed to happen with some boards on some bowing machines (we had them on route)... it seems resolve itself for a while with a reboot. i think it has something to do with the bios reporting weird numbers to the os... and i'll explain why...

I had an older GT 2010 box (all the IT games use a similar boardset) I did some work on it the other day, and the bios reported the CPU temp in the actual bios as 65525 and the system temp as 65534 it was obviously not overheating, but weird nonetheless.  not sure if it (the bios) was modded byt IT to output particular values or what... but the game (upgraded up to version 2015) in the operator menu-> system info, properly showed the temp value in degrees Celsius despite the weird numbers in BIOS.

so i guess what i'm saying is that it (weird temp numbers) was probably patched later on in software (if this was the case.)