PC freezes up: PSU problem or capacitors?

[X-ray]

Ok dudes and dudettes, here's my problem: I have an Athlon 2100+ PC (GA-7DXE mobo). Brief specs:

2gb RAM (two 1gb DIMMS)
SCSI card, SATA Raid card (2 HDs), USB2 + Firewire combo card
Network card for my broadband
GeForce 4 MX440 AGP
2 IDE HDs and two CD/DVD drives

Over the past two months I have been getting freezes, mainly when playing Wolfenstein TCE mod. The machine locks up and the screen stays frozen. The same freeze also happened a few times while printing, and a few times while the SETI screensaver was running.

Here is what I tried:

1) Alternate GFX card (older Geforce)
2) Different PSU
3) Uninstalled TCE and reinstalled it on a different drive
4) Tried alternate 1gb sticks of RAM alone
5) Took out the SATA controller and both drives
6) Added another case fan
7) Checked and replaced CPU fan and thermal paste

This hasn't remedied my problem and I supect it is heat-related or similar because I don't get crashes in the first half hour of PC use, even if I launch straight into the game.

Then today I found out two interesting facts:

1) The four capacitors that are found around my CPU have bulged tops and a brown residue ontop. All other caps are okay, just the ones closest to the CPU are affected.

2) Ran 'Everest Home' and checked what voltages it reports, and compared two PSUs. One PSU gives me slightly over 12v and the other slightly less, and both give less than 5v (one is 4.73 and the other is 4.88). Neither one gives me 3.3v: they are both under, the worst being 3.09v and the best being 3.20v.

Sooooo...

Am I being screwed by the PSUs or do I just replace the mobo because of the caps?

Another thing: Everest reports my FSB as being 133.99 but the bios says 133 and that is the minimum value I can set. This is not an overclocked PC.

[Piru]

1) The four capacitors that are found around my CPU have bulged tops and a brown residue ontop. All other caps are okay, just the ones closest to the CPU are affected.

Am I being screwed by the PSUs or do I just replace the mobo because of the caps?

The caps are it. You either need to replace the caps or the mobo.

[amigaoneproductions]

Agreed,  the capacitors are most likely cause,  quite a common fault that I have had to fix at work,  changing £1 worth of capacitors has saved us quite a bit of money instead of buying new boards.  Of course you need to have the skills to change the capacitors otherwise you still end up with a faulty board and still need a new one ;-)

[X-ray]

@ Piru

Well I suppose I have nothing to lose by screwing up the mobo with a bad solder job, but are these caps readily available? (and price?)

[X-ray]

@ amigaoneproductions

I'm basically a lubber with a soldering iron. I can do simple things but that is it. Is there anything special I have to do to replace those caps?

[X-ray]

Okay guys I checked it out and I'll probably have a go: got some good info here.

[blobrana]

Hum,
just to be sure, download and run Speedfan to  check the voltages and temperatures.

http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php

[CatHerder]

If you don't have a local electronics supplier, I've purchased capacitors and other electronic components from Quest Components online a few times. They've been fast, reasonably priced and quite helpful and they almost always have whatever I need in stock (the boast 630 million parts in stock). questcomp.com is their website.

[X-ray]

Thanks guys (and one gal)...
I'm going to have a go at this, but just in case I screw up, does anyone recommend a mobo+cpu I should look at if I upgrade?

[jj]

As regards to a mobo & cpu combo to upgrade to it all depends on two things

a) your budget
b) what you want to do with your pc

If  your looking to do a lot of media related things like mp3 encpoding, and video stream encoding, go with a pentium 4 solution, prorbably for speed and power go with a pentium4 M   , which is based on the much better pentium 3 architecture

If your a game nut either go with a 64bit sempron, or they fully fledged amd64 fx etc

if your looking to do it on a budget, get a socket a mbob with all the latest features and get either a 2500+ barton core(just up the fsb 400 and hey presto 3200+ for much less

or if you can get one at the moment( i know i couldnt recently got a 3200+ xp

hope this helps

[X-ray]

@ JJ

If I go for an AMD-based setup 3ghz, can you recommend a particular mobo? It will be a general purpose machine (some games, raytracing, gfx, MP3). I would say the only thing I don't need is a blindingly fast GFX card, and I am happy with onbaord sound. Oh and SATA raid is a must.

[blobrana]

Hum,

£30.00 MoBo...

Though i would spend a bit more for 400fdb

Take your pick