NOS 520STFM Motherboard/PSU care

[stephen_usher]

I prefer this analogy to the kidney one:
Even if I managed to find a 30 year old NOS classic car, I would still change its oil :)

Except, what's being proposed is not "changing the oil", it's doing a major strip-down and replacing the engine management system (potentially with a 3rd party after-market one) and gearbox bearings.

[exxos]

Okay people, we are not getting into all that " tit for tat" discussions over analogies. I'm also locking this thread as there are countless discussions over capacitors spanning years and they often turn into 50+ pages of " discussions" of "this verses that" which really does not help anyone at all. They never come to a conclusion and just end up being pages of opinions by people. It boils down to replace them or not. There is a lot more evidence to support that they should be replaced than not.

I have already declared replacing old capacitors as a mandatory fix as I have seen these power supplies failing for 25+ years. As some people have pointed out over the years (Including myself) , some power supplies do stand the test of time better than others, but that is literally a gamble and those individual power supplies do not represent *all" power supplies as some people would have you believing. A lot of people simply don't have the test equipment expertise or knowledge to seriously diagnose if capacitors are operating correctly or not. Time would just be better spent replacing them and have done with it anyway.

Also, Just because your machine powers up fine does not mean it is operating correctly. As I pointed out before, I suspect the spikes in the power supply is what is killing the Videl's and other chips in falcons, and also possibly the RAM, including RAM on ST's. Some bad power supplies can spike up to several volts as I have already documented. At some point those 50,000 times a second 7 volts spikes are going to kill your machine. Similarly with huge ripples which can appear on aged power supplies of a couple of volts.

The fact remains that a considerable amount of capacitors have failed and that is literally the bottom line that these should simply be replaced regardless. I also should point out that only quality branded capacitors should be used, and only sourced from reputable suppliers (not ebay!). As I have also pointed out, some cheap capacitors are not suitable for switchmodes, and can actually be worse than the ones which are being replaced. It is why I generally recommend Panasonic branded capacitors such as the FR series. If you cannot solder or don't know what you are doing then just get someone to service it for you and while you're at it get the other mandatory fixes done at the same time.

So if people want to take the gamble that their capacitors are okay, that's fine with me, a lot of us here would simply not do that. Machines are failing faster than they can be repaired in recent years and if people want to give it a nudge into the failure direction by something which is connected to the mains, then that is of course your choice to make.