Recap and Reflow

flysideways · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 29 Jan 2005 Posts: 145

Anyone skilled at recapping and reflowing motherboards? I have three of the same MSI motherboards that had caps by their chipset bulge and from what I have read that motherboard also regularly needs the chipset reflowed. This could have been prevented had the motherboards had better cap placement and a better cooler or fan on the chipset but ... Wondering if there was any advice on method and tools.

Thanks in advance.

wswartzendruber · Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2012 1:49 am Post subject:

I take it that a cap is a capacitor. But what is "reflowing?"

ichbinsisyphos · Guru Joined: 08 Dec 2006 Posts: 547

The motherboards I have seen in my life all had through-hole capacitors, so that should be straight forward. I have no experience with reflow soldering, but I know I would not do it just for fun, only if the motherboard was damaged.
Then I would probably try one of those hot air-things, melt the old solder locally. With other methods and if you need to apply new solder it will get messy.

John-Boy · Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2012 5:33 am Post subject:

Bad caps ? Probably less fuss getting hold of a new (or second hand) mobo.
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eccerr0r · Advocate Joined: 01 Jul 2004 Posts: 3002 Location: USA

Desoldering caps from 4-layer boards is not fun, especially on ground planes...
Reflowing would be a last resort for me, though mainly because I don't have the proper equipment. I tried melting the solder off a bga device on a board with a heat gun, definitely a lot of traps that can be fallen into.

Really it's a design flaw if a board requires reflow once in a while... I'd probably RMA it or trash it...
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pjp · Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2013 3:18 pm Post subject:

I have an MSI with what appears to have been a bad DIMM channel. I guess I'll put them on my do not buy list for now. (Replacement was a Gigabyte, though with no on board video).