Polling ABIT KX7-333/R owners: does your board have silver or black caps?

[MrLavender]

Two boards, one a revision 1.0 the other a 1.1, both silver caps, both undervolt on the 5v and 12v.

The 1.1 overclocks a lot better.

[keiths]

If we really want to call ourselves extreme, we should follow the audiophiles example and replace caps with super high quality versions. I've been doing searches on capacitors and finding a ton of info(a little overwhelmed to settle on which links to possibly point out), alot of it being audiophile sites and even vendors catering to the niche market of capacitor replacements for sound equipment. The highend caps cost 10x as much, for ex. $1 vs 0.10c., but if there's only two caps to replace as it's suggested for the kx7-333's what's the big deal since each capacitor only having two leads to solder? I'm curious if this has already crossed some peoples minds.

[keiths]

BTW, from what I've found so far, Nichicon are considered high quality, but not the best. Here's a guy replacing what looks to be the same Nichicon capacitor used in the KX7 with something 'better' and the guy considers the cap he's replacing the Nichicon with as a stop gap before reaching the uber high end: http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache...hl=en&ie=UTF-8

[keiths]

From what I can tell from a shot of the caps from the following KX7
review, the capacitors are Nichicon 4700uf 6.3v(or is it 63v?). Could someone verify?

http://www.bench-house.com/tests/mai...3/nichicon.jpg

[sjohnson]

keiths - Not only do I believe that is a good idea (as long as you accept that the board cannot be RMA'd after), I've been looking for quality replacement caps myself. Break-in of analog components has long been important to audiophiles and can't help but believe that break-in of caps is part of a board's burnin process. Quality caps just add to the overall performance capability of a board.

Pegelius, at OCWB, was the first to get to 200 FSB on the otherwise crippled ECS K7S5A. He uses not only turbo PLL's but adds filter caps in some of the seemingly craziest places, simply to filter any extraneous noise from his boards.

[JPP]

1. KX 7 Raid Rev 1.0 Nichichon caps
2. KX 7 Raid Rev 1.1 Nichichon caps voltages higher by aprox 0.1 Volt and more stable.
Btw this caps are 6.3 Volt.
JPP

[keiths]

Doing a search on deja in alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.abit gives plenty of hits on capacitors. There's a guy in the forums that sells replacement capacitor sets or will solder them on for you(not cheap). I actually had read about this guy before and had forgotten: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=ni...att.net&rnum=1

Here's his web page, which is very informative on the subject:
http://home.att.net/~garyheadlee/

&&&, Nichicon 4700uf 6.3v HD low impedance 105 degree capacitors: $2.040 each in quantities under 10. http://www.mouser.com/index.cfm?hand...oductid=346356

[keiths]

This is another good thread:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...177%26rnum%3D1